Empathy: Recognizing What Others Feel

A tone of voice, a silence that runs longer than usual, an “I’m fine” that doesn’t sound fine. Empathy is the ability to pick up on what another person feels even when they don’t say it, and to understand why they feel it.

In the emotional intelligence model popularized by Daniel Goleman (1995), empathy is one of five components, alongside self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation and social skills. Since the 1980s, psychological research has been showing that several different processes live under that one word, and telling them apart explains a lot about why empathy sometimes helps and sometimes wears you out.

Understanding and feeling: the two sides of empathy

In 1983, psychologist Mark Davis published the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), still one of the most widely used empathy questionnaires. His central idea was that empathy is not a single thing, and he measured it with four scales:

• Perspective taking: the tendency to adopt the other person’s point of view.
• Fantasy: how easily you step into the feelings of characters in books or films.
• Empathic concern: feeling warmth and concern for someone who is having a hard time.
• Personal distress: feeling anxious or uncomfortable yourself in the face of someone else’s suffering.

That is where the distinction used by almost every model today comes from:

• Cognitive empathy is understanding: inferring what the other person thinks and feels, and why.
• Affective empathy is resonating: letting the other person’s emotion move you inside.

The two don’t always go together. Some people read exactly what is going on in a meeting without being much affected by it, while others catch the mood of whoever is next to them without quite knowing what is causing it. Our empathy test separates precisely those two dimensions, with two facets in each.

How it shows up day to day

When empathy is well developed, it usually shows in concrete behaviors:

• Picking up on someone’s state without being told, from tone, gestures or context.
• Understanding viewpoints very different from your own without needing to share them.
• Adjusting how you communicate to how the other person seems to be feeling.
• Noticing when an “I’m fine” isn’t, more from the melody of the sentence than from the words, an idea we develop in our article on active listening.

Do we read others correctly? Empathic accuracy

Feeling empathic and getting it right are not the same thing. In 1990, psychologist William Ickes designed a method to measure the difference. He videotaped two people having a conversation; afterward, each one watched the recording, stopped it at the moments when they had thought or felt something, and wrote it down. Then each had to guess what the other was thinking at the moments the other had marked. Comparing the two gave a measure of empathic accuracy.

One result from this line of work is especially useful: familiarity helps. In a 1992 study, Linda Stinson and Ickes compared pairs of friends with pairs of strangers, and the friends were considerably better at guessing what the other was thinking. Knowing someone’s history gives you context for reading their gestures.

Even so, not even friends get it right every time. That is why checking instead of assuming is part of empathy, not an extra: asking “did what I said earlier bother you?” corrects mistakes that intuition alone misses.

The emotion underneath the emotion

Psychologist Leslie Greenberg, one of the leading figures in emotion-focused therapy, speaks of empathic attunement: picking up on what the other person actually feels, even when what they show on the outside is something else. His distinction between primary, secondary and instrumental emotions, which we explain as applied to yourself in emotional self-awareness, works for reading other people too.

An everyday example: a coworker snaps at a trivial comment. The visible reaction is anger, but underneath there may be fatigue, a worry that has nothing to do with the conversation, or embarrassment over a mistake that morning. Accurate empathy asks what lies underneath before responding only to the sharpness.

When empathy wears you out: empathic distress and compassion

In 2014, neuroscientist Tania Singer and psychologist Olga Klimecki proposed a distinction that helps explain the emotional wear of many caring professions:

• Empathic distress is sharing someone else’s suffering in a way that turns it into your own. It comes with negative emotions and, over time, can lead people to withdraw to protect themselves.
• Compassion is feeling warmth and concern for the other person, with a wish to help. It comes with positive emotions and encourages helping behavior.

Their team put this to the test with training programs. In a study by Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard and Singer (2014), one group practiced empathic resonance first and compassion afterward. After the empathy training, videos of people suffering produced more negative affect and more activity in the anterior insula and the anterior midcingulate cortex, regions associated with empathy for pain. The compassion training that followed reversed that rise in negative affect, raised positive affect and activated a different brain network, which included the ventral striatum and the medial orbitofrontal cortex.

The usual reading of these studies is that the problem is not empathizing too much but getting stuck in the resonance. That is why empathy is almost always discussed alongside emotional self-regulation, where we also explain the idea of the “double reaction” from physician and psychotherapist Norberto Levy.

Empathy and boundaries

A common misunderstanding is to confuse empathy with people-pleasing. Understanding why someone wants something does not oblige you to give it to them. In negotiation, the experiments by Adam Galinsky and his team (2008), on which our test draws, found that getting inside the other person’s head helped people reach better deals, while focusing on feeling what the other person felt did not improve the outcomes.

Cognitive empathy lets you understand the other person and hold your own position at the same time, a balance that is also at work in assertive communication.

If you want to see how the cognitive and affective sides combine in you, you can take our empathy test, and to see it alongside the other components, the emotional intelligence test.

Disclaimer: this article is for general information only and does not replace the assessment, diagnosis or intervention of a mental health professional.

Sources

• Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113-126. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.44.1.113
• Ickes, W., Stinson, L., Bissonnette, V., and Garcia, S. (1990). Naturalistic social cognition: Empathic accuracy in mixed-sex dyads. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(4), 730-742. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.59.4.730
• Stinson, L., and Ickes, W. (1992). Empathic accuracy in the interactions of male friends versus male strangers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62(5), 787-797. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.62.5.787
• Singer, T., and Klimecki, O. M. (2014). Empathy and compassion. Current Biology, 24(18), R875-R878. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.06.054
• Klimecki, O. M., Leiberg, S., Ricard, M., and Singer, T. (2014). Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(6), 873-879. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nst060
• Galinsky, A. D., Maddux, W. W., Gilin, D., and White, J. B. (2008). Why it pays to get inside the head of your opponent: The differential effects of perspective taking and empathy in negotiations. Psychological Science, 19(4), 378-384. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02096.x
• Greenberg, L. S. (2002). Emotion-Focused Therapy: Coaching Clients to Work Through Their Feelings. American Psychological Association.
• Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books.