Empathy

From New World Encyclopedia
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Hugging someone who is hurt is a signal of empathy.

Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, by placing oneself (mentally) in another's position. Definitions of empathy encompass a broad range of social, cognitive, and emotional processes primarily concerned with understanding others (and others' emotions in particular). Types of empathy include cognitive empathy, emotional (or affective) empathy, somatic empathy, and spiritual empathy.

Etymology

Being there for another

The English word empathy is derived from the Ancient Greek ἐμπάθεια empatheia, meaning "physical affection or passion"). That word derives from ἐν (en, "in, at") and πάθος (pathos, "passion" or "suffering").[1] Theodor Lipps adapted the German aesthetic term Einfühlung ("feeling into") to psychology in 1903,[2] and Edward B. Titchener translated Einfühlung into English as "empathy" in 1909.[3]

Definitions

Since its introduction into the English language, empathy has had a wide range of (sometimes conflicting) definitions among both researchers and laypeople.[4] Empathy definitions encompass a broad range of phenomena, including caring for other people and having a desire to help them; experiencing emotions that match another person's emotions; discerning what another person is thinking or feeling; and making less distinct the differences between the self and the other.[5]

Related concepts

Compassion and sympathy are terms associated with empathy. A person feels compassion when they notice others are in need, and this feeling motivates that person to help. Like empathy, compassion has a wide range of definitions and purported facets (which overlap with some definitions of empathy).[6] Sympathy is a feeling of care and understanding for someone in need. Some include in sympathy an empathic concern for another person, and the wish to see them better off or happier.[7]

Empathy is also related to pity.[8][7] One feels pity towards others who might be in trouble or in need of help. This feeling is described as "feeling sorry" for someone.

Classification

There are two major types of empathy: cognitive empathy, emotional (or affective) empathy.[9] Affective and cognitive empathy are independent from one another; someone who strongly empathizes emotionally is not necessarily good in understanding another's perspective.

Affective empathy

Also called emotional empathy, affective empathy is the ability to respond with an appropriate emotion to another's mental states.[10] Our ability to empathize emotionally is based on emotional contagion, being affected by another's emotional or arousal state.[11]

Affective empathy can be subdivided as follows:[10][12]

  • Empathic concern

Empathic concern is evidenced as sympathy and compassion for others in response to their suffering.[10][13]

  • Personal distress

People often experience feelings of discomfort and anxiety in response to another's suffering.[10][13] However, there is no consensus regarding whether personal distress is a form of empathy or instead is something distinct from empathy.[8] There may be a developmental aspect to this subdivision. Infants respond to the distress of others by getting distressed themselves; only when they are two years old do they start to respond in other-oriented ways: trying to help, comfort, and share.

  • Affective mentalizing

People may use clues like body language, facial expressions, knowledge about the other's beliefs, situation, and context to understand more about their empathetic feelings.[2]

  • Empathic Anger

Empathic anger is an emotion, a form of empathic distress. It is felt in a situation where someone else is being hurt by another person or thing.[14] Empathic anger affects desires both to help and to punish.

  • Empathic Distress

Empathic distress is feeling the perceived pain of another person. This feeling can be transformed into empathic anger, feelings of injustice, or guilt. These emotions can be perceived as pro-social. However, views differ as to whether they serve as motives for moral behavior.[14][15]

Cognitive empathy

Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand another's perspective or mental state.[16][10] Although measures of cognitive empathy include self-report questionnaires and behavioral measures, a 2019 meta-analysis found only a negligible association between self-report and behavioral measures, suggesting that people are generally not able to accurately assess their own cognitive empathy abilities.[17]

Cognitive empathy can be subdivided as follows:[10][12]

  • Perspective-taking: the tendency to spontaneously adopt others' psychological perspectives.
  • Fantasy: the tendency to identify with fictional characters.<
  • Tactical (or strategic) empathy: the deliberate use of perspective-taking to achieve certain desired ends.
  • Emotion regulation: a damper on the emotional contagion process that allows you to empathize without being overwhelmed by the emotion you are empathizing with.[18]

The scientific community has not coalesced around a precise definition of these constructs, but there is consensus about this distinction.[19]

Measurement

Efforts to measure empathy go back to at least the mid-twentieth century, and researchers have approach it from a number of perspectives.

Behavioral measures normally involve raters assessing the presence or absence of certain behaviors, both verbal and non-verbal, in the subjects they are monitoring. Both verbal and non-verbal behaviors have been captured on video by experimenters. Other experimenters have required subjects to comment upon their own feelings and behaviors, or those of other people involved in the experiment, as indirect ways of signaling their level of empathic functioning.

Physiological responses tend to be captured by electronic equipment that has been physically connected to the subject's body. Researchers may then draw inferences about that person's empathic reactions from the electronic readings produced.

Subjects may be asked to read scenarios or watch video scenarios (either staged or authentic) and make written responses which are then assessed for their levels of empathy.

Picture or puppet-story indices for empathy have been adopted to enable even very young, pre-school subjects to respond without needing to read questions and write answers.

Self-report measures

Measures of empathy often require subjects to self-report upon their own ability or capacity for empathy, using Likert-style numerical responses to a printed questionnaire that may have been designed to reveal the affective, cognitive-affective, or largely cognitive substrates of empathic functioning. However, a 2019 meta analysis questions the validity of self-report measures of cognitive empathy, finding that such self-report measures have negligibly small correlations with corresponding behavioral measures.[17]

Such measures are also vulnerable to measuring not empathy but the difference between a person's felt empathy and their standards for how much empathy is appropriate. For example, students scored themselves as less empathetic after taking a class discussing empathy. After learning more about empathy, the students became more exacting in how they judged their own feelings and behavior, expected more from themselves, and so rated themselves more severely.[2]

The Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) is among the oldest published measurement tools still in frequent use (first published in 1983) that provides a multi-dimensional assessment of empathy. It comprises a self-report questionnaire of 28 items, divided into four seven-item scales covering the subdivisions of affective and cognitive empathy described above.[10][12] More recent self-report tools include The Empathy Quotient (EQ), which comprises a self-report questionnaire consisting of 60 items.[20] Another multi-dimensional scale is the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE, first published in 2011).[21]

The Empathic Experience Scale is a 30-item questionnaire that measures empathy from a phenomenological perspective on intersubjectivity, which provides a common basis for the perceptual experience (vicarious experience dimension) and a basic cognitive awareness (intuitive understanding dimension) of others' emotional states.[22]

It is difficult to make comparisons over time using such questionnaires because of how language changes. For example, one study using a single questionnaire to measure 13,737 college students between 1979 and 2009 found that empathy scores fell substantially over that time. A critic noted these results could be because the wording of the questionnaire had become anachronistically quaint (it used idioms no longer in common use, like "tender feelings," "ill at ease," "quite touched," or "go to pieces," that today's students might not identify with).[23]

Influence on helping behavior

Investigators into the social response to natural disasters researched the characteristics associated with individuals who help victims. Researchers found that cognitive empathy, rather than emotional empathy, predicted helping behavior towards victims.[24] Taking on the perspectives of others (cognitive empathy) may allow these helpers to better empathize with victims without as much discomfort, whereas sharing the emotions of the victims (emotional empathy) can cause emotional distress, helplessness, and victim-blaming, and may lead to avoidance rather than helping.[25]

Empathy-induced altruism may not always produce pro-social effects. For example, it could lead one to exert oneself on behalf of those for whom empathy is felt at the expense of other potential pro-social goals, thus inducing a type of bias. Researchers suggest that individuals are willing to act against the greater collective good or to violate their own moral principles of fairness and justice if doing so will benefit a person for whom empathy is felt.[26]

Therapeutic programs to foster altruistic impulses by encouraging perspective-taking and empathic feelings might enable individuals to develop more satisfactory interpersonal relations, especially in the long-term. Empathy-induced altruism can improve attitudes toward stigmatized groups, racial attitudes, and actions toward people with AIDS, the homeless, and convicts. Such resulting altruism also increases cooperation in competitive situations.[27]

Empathy is good at prompting prosocial behaviors that are informal, unplanned, and directed at someone who is immediately present, but is not as good at prompting more abstractly-considered, long-term prosocial behavior.[28]

Development

Ontogenetic development

By the age of two, children normally begin to exhibit fundamental behaviors of empathy by having an emotional response that corresponds with another person's emotional state.[29] Even earlier, at one year of age, infants have some rudiments of empathy; they understand that, as with their own actions, other people's actions have goals.[30] Toddlers sometimes comfort others or show concern for them. Although children as young as 18 months to two years are capable of showing some signs of empathy, including attempting to comfort a crying baby, most do not demonstrate a full theory of mind until around the age of four. Theory of mind involves the ability to understand that other people may have beliefs that are different from one's own, and is thought to involve the cognitive component of empathy.[16]

According to researchers at the University of Chicago who used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), children between the ages of seven and twelve, when seeing others being injured, experience brain activity similar that which would occur if the child themself had been injured.[31] Their findings are consistent with previous fMRI studies of pain empathy with adults, and previous findings that vicarious experiencing, particularly of others' distress, is hardwired and present early in life. The research also found additional areas of the brain, associated with social and moral cognition, were activated when young people saw another person intentionally hurt by somebody, including regions involved in moral reasoning.[31]

Sex differences

It has been found that, on average, females score higher than males on measures of empathy, such as the Empathy Quotient (EQ)[32] However, other studies show no significant sex differences, and instead suggest that gender differences could be the result of motivational differences, such as upholding stereotypes.[32][33]

Environmental influences

Some researchers have theorized that environmental factors, such as parenting style and relationships, affect the development of empathy in children.

There is some evidence that empathy is a skill that one can improve in with training. Learning by teaching is one method used to teach empathy. Students transmit new content to their classmates, so they have to reflect continuously on those classmates' mental processes. This develops the students' feeling for group reactions and networking. Carl Rogers pioneered research in effective psychotherapy and teaching which espoused that empathy coupled with unconditional positive regard or caring for students and authenticity or congruence were the most important traits for a therapist or teacher to have. Other research and meta-analyses corroborated the importance of these person-centered traits.[34]

Genetics

The basic capacity to recognize emotions in others may be innate.[35]

Measures of empathy show evidence of being genetically influenced.[36] For example, a gene located near LRRN1 on chromosome 3 influences the human ability to read, understand, and respond to emotions in others.[37]

Neuroscientific basis of empathy

Contemporary neuroscience offers insights into the neural basis of the mind's ability to understand and process emotion. Empathy is a spontaneous sharing of affect, provoked by witnessing and sympathizing with another's emotional state. The empathic person mirrors or mimics the emotional response they would expect to feel if they were in the other person's place. Studies of mirror neurons attempt to measure the neural basis for human mind-reading and emotion-sharing abilities and thereby to explain the basis of the empathy reaction.[38] People who score high on empathy tests have especially busy mirror neuron systems.[39]

fMRI has been employed to investigate the functional anatomy of empathy. Observing another person's emotional state activates parts of the neuronal network that are involved in processing that same state in oneself, whether it is disgust, touch, or pain.[13] As these emotional states are being observed, the brain is able activate a network of the brain that is involved in empathy.

Meta-analysis of fMRI studies of empathy confirms that different brain areas are activated during affective-perceptual empathy than during cognitive-evaluative empathy. Affective empathy is correlated with increased activity in the insula while cognitive empathy is correlated with activity in the mid cingulate cortex and adjacent dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.[40] A study with patients who experienced different types of brain damage also confirmed this distinction between emotional and cognitive empathy. Specifically, the inferior frontal gyrus appears to be responsible for emotional empathy, and the ventromedial prefrontal gyrus seems to mediate cognitive empathy.[41]

Mirroring-behavior in motor neurons during empathy may help duplicate feelings. Such sympathetic action may afford access to sympathetic feelings and, perhaps, trigger emotions of kindness and forgiveness.[42][43]

Evolution across species

There is strong evidence that empathy is not exclusive to humans. Empathy has deep evolutionary, biochemical, and neurological underpinnings, and that even the most advanced forms of empathy in humans are built on more basic forms and remain connected to core mechanisms associated with affective communication, social attachment, and parental care.[44]

Empathy-like behaviors have been observed in primates, both in captivity and in the wild, and in particular in bonobos, perhaps the most empathic primate.[45] Bonobos seek out body contact with one another as a coping mechanism, and have been found to seek out more body contact after watching other bonobos in distress than after their individually experienced stressful event. [46]

Empathic-like behavior has been observed in chimpanzees in different aspects of their natural behaviors. For example, chimpanzees spontaneously contribute comforting behaviors to victims of aggressive behavior in both natural and unnatural settings. This behavior is also found in humans, particularly in human infants. Another similarity found between chimpanzees and humans is that empathic-like responding was disproportionately provided to kin. Although comforting towards non-family chimpanzees was also observed, as with humans, chimpanzees showed the majority of comfort and concern to close/loved ones.

Empathy between species

Humans can empathize with other species and vice versa.

Canines appear to share empathic-like responding towards human species. Researchers Custance and Mayer adapted an experimental protocol first used with human infants to investigate empathy in domestic dogs. Individual dogs in an enclosure with their owner and a stranger. When the participants were talking or humming, the dog showed no behavioral changes; however when the participants were pretending to cry, the dogs oriented their behavior toward the person in distress whether it be the owner or stranger. The dogs approached the participants when crying in a submissive fashion, by sniffing, licking, and nuzzling the distressed person rather than approaching in the usual form of excitement, tail wagging, or panting. Since the dogs did not direct their empathic-like responses only towards their owner, it was hypothesized that dogs generally seek out humans showing distressing body behavior. [47]

Impairment

Empathy may be disrupted due to brain trauma such as stroke. In most cases, empathy is impaired if a lesion or stroke occurs on the right side of the brain.[48] Damage to the frontal lobe, which is primarily responsible for emotional regulation, can profoundly impact a person's capacity to experience empathy.[49] People with an acquired brain injury also show lower levels of empathy. More than half of those people with a traumatic brain injury self-report a deficit in their empathic capacity.[50]

A difference in distribution between affective and cognitive empathy has been observed in various conditions. Psychopathy and narcissism are associated with impairments in affective but not cognitive empathy, whereas bipolar disorder is associated with deficits in cognitive but not affective empathy. People with Borderline personality disorder may suffer from impairments in cognitive empathy as well as fluctuating affective empathy, although this topic is controversial.[19] Autism spectrum disorders are associated with various combinations, including deficits in cognitive empathy as well as deficits in both cognitive and affective empathy.[10][41][19][51][52] Schizophrenia, too, is associated with deficits in both types of empathy.[53] However, even in people without conditions such as these, the balance between affective and cognitive empathy varies.[19]

Atypical empathic responses are associated with autism and particular personality disorders such as psychopathy, borderline, narcissistic, and schizoid personality disorders; conduct disorder;[54] schizophrenia; bipolar disorder;[19] and depersonalization.[55] Sex offenders who had been raised in an environment where they were shown a lack of empathy and had endured abuse of the sort they later committed, felt less affective empathy for their victims.[56]

Autism

The interaction between empathy and autism is a complex and ongoing field of research. Several different factors are proposed to be at play.

A study of high-functioning adults with autistic spectrum disorders found an increased prevalence of alexithymia,[57] a personality construct characterized by the inability to recognize and articulate emotional arousal in oneself or others.[57][58] Some fMRI research indicates that alexithymia contributes to a lack of empathy.[59] The lack of empathic attunement inherent to alexithymic states may reduce quality[60] and satisfaction[61] of relationships. Empathy deficits associated with the autism spectrum may be due to significant comorbidity between alexithymia and autism spectrum conditions rather than a result of social impairment.[62]

Relative to typically developing children, high-functioning autistic children showed reduced mirror neuron activity in the brain's inferior frontal gyrus (pars opercularis) while imitating and observing emotional expressions in neurotypical children.[63] EEG evidence revealed significantly greater mu suppression in the sensorimotor cortex of autistic individuals. Activity in this area was inversely related to symptom severity in the social domain, suggesting that a dysfunctional mirror neuron system may underlie social and communication deficits observed in autism, including impaired theory of mind and cognitive empathy.[64] The mirror neuron system is essential for emotional empathy.[41]

Studies have suggested that autistic individuals have an impaired theory of mind.[10] Theory of mind relies on structures of the temporal lobe and the pre-frontal cortex; empathy relies on the sensorimotor cortices as well as limbic and para-limbic structures.[65] The lack of clear distinctions between theory of mind and cognitive empathy may have caused an incomplete understanding of the empathic abilities of those with Asperger syndrome; many reports on the empathic deficits of individuals with Asperger syndrome are actually based on impairments in theory of mind.[10][66] Although autistic people have difficulties in recognizing and articulating emotions, some studies have reported that while they may lack cognitive empathy (the ability to assume another's emotions), they have higher than average levels of affective empathy (feeling the emotions that another is feeling, once they are known).[67]

Individuals on the autistic spectrum self-report lower levels of empathic concern, show less or absent comforting responses toward someone who is suffering, and report equal or higher levels of personal distress compared to controls. The combination of reduced empathic concern and increased personal distress may lead to the overall reduction in empathy. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen suggests that those with classic autism often lack both cognitive and affective empathy.[52] However, other research found no evidence of impairment in autistic individuals' ability to understand other people's basic intentions or goals; instead, data suggests that impairments are found in understanding more complex social emotions or in considering others' viewpoints.[68] People with Asperger syndrome may have problems understanding others' perspectives in terms of theory of mind, but the average person with the condition demonstrates equal empathic concern as, and higher personal distress than, controls.[10] The existence of individuals with heightened personal distress on the autism spectrum is a possible explanation for why some people with autism appear to have heightened emotional empathy.[51] Although increased personal distress may be an effect of heightened egocentrism, emotional empathy depends on mirror neuron activity (which, as described previously, has been found to be reduced in those with autism), and empathy in people on the autism spectrum is generally reduced.[41]

The empathizing–systemizing theory (E-S) classifies people by testing their capabilities along two independent dimensions—empathizing (E) and systemizing (S)—to establish their Empathy Quotient (EQ) and Systemizing Quotient (SQ). Five "brain types" can be distinguished based on such scores, which are theorized to correlate with differences at the neural level. In E-S theory, autism and Asperger syndrome are associated with below-average empathy and average or above-average systemizing.[69]

The E-S theory has been extended into the extreme male brain (EMB) theory, which suggests that people with an autism spectrum condition are more likely to have an "Extreme Type S" brain type, corresponding with above-average systemizing but challenged empathy. EMB theory proposes that individuals on the autistic spectrum are characterized by impairments in empathy due to sex differences in the brain: specifically, people with autism spectrum conditions show an exaggerated male profile. Some aspects of autistic neuroanatomy seem to be extrapolations of typical male neuroanatomy, which may be influenced by elevated levels of fetal testosterone rather than gender itself.[69][70]

The double empathy problem theory proposes that prior studies on autism and empathy may have been misinterpreted and that autistic people show the same levels of cognitive empathy towards one another as non-autistic people do.[71]

Empathy deficits present in autism spectrum disorders may be more indicative of impairments in the ability to take the perspective of others, while the empathy deficits in psychopathy may be more indicative of impairments in responsiveness to others' emotions. These "disorders of empathy" further highlight the importance of the ability to empathize, by the way they illustrate some of the consequences of disrupted empathy development.[72]

Psychopathy

Psychopathy is a personality disorder partly characterized by antisocial and aggressive behaviors, as well as emotional and interpersonal deficits including shallow emotions and a lack of remorse and empathy.[73] The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD) list antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) and dissocial personality disorder, stating that these have been referred to as or include what is referred to as psychopathy.[74]

Psychopathy is associated with atypical responses to distress cues (e.g. facial and vocal expressions of fear and sadness), including decreased activation of the fusiform and extrastriate cortical regions, which may partly account for impaired recognition of and reduced autonomic responsiveness to expressions of fear, and impairments of empathy.[75][76] Studies on children with psychopathic tendencies have also shown such associations.[77][78][79] The underlying {{ safesubst:#invoke:Unsubst||date=__DATE__ |$B= biological surfaces{{#invoke:Category handler|main}}{{#invoke:Category handler|main}}[clarification needed] }} for processing expressions of happiness are functionally intact in psychopaths, although less responsive than in those of controls.[76][77][78][79] The neuroimaging literature is unclear as to whether deficits are specific to particular emotions such as fear. Some fMRI studies report that emotion perception deficits in psychopathy are pervasive across emotions (positives and negatives).[80]

One study on psychopaths found that, under certain circumstances, they could willfully empathize with others, and that their empathic reaction initiated the same way it does for controls. Psychopathic criminals were brain-scanned while watching videos of a person harming another individual. The psychopaths' empathic reaction initiated the same way it did for controls when they were instructed to empathize with the harmed individual, and the area of the brain relating to pain was activated when the psychopaths were asked to imagine how the harmed individual felt. The research suggests psychopaths can switch empathy on at will, which would enable them to be both callous and charming. The team who conducted the study say they do not know how to transform this willful empathy into the spontaneous empathy most people have, though they propose it might be possible to rehabilitate psychopaths by helping them to activate their "empathy switch". Others suggested that it remains unclear whether psychopaths' experience of empathy was the same as that of controls, and also questioned the possibility of devising therapeutic interventions that would make the empathic reactions more automatic.[81]

One problem with the theory that the ability to turn empathy on and off constitutes psychopathy is that such a theory would classify socially sanctioned violence and punishment as psychopathy, as these entail suspending empathy towards certain individuals and/or groups. The attempt to get around this by standardizing tests of psychopathy for cultures with different norms of punishment is criticized in this context for being based on the assumption that people can be classified in discrete cultures while cultural influences are in reality mixed and every person encounters a mosaic of influences. Psychopathy may be an artefact of psychiatry's standardization along imaginary sharp lines between cultures, as opposed to an actual difference in the brain.[82]

Work conducted by Professor Jean Decety with large samples of incarcerated psychopaths offers additional insights. In one study, psychopaths were scanned while viewing video clips depicting people being intentionally hurt. They were also tested on their responses to seeing short videos of facial expressions of pain. The participants in the high-psychopathy group exhibited significantly less activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and periaqueductal gray parts of the brain, but more activity in the striatum and the insula when compared to control participants.[83] In a second study, individuals with psychopathy exhibited a strong response in pain-affective brain regions when taking an imagine-self perspective, but failed to recruit the neural circuits that were activated in controls during an imagine-other perspective—in particular the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and amygdala—which may contribute to their lack of empathic concern.[84]

Researchers have investigated whether people who have high levels of psychopathy have sufficient levels of cognitive empathy but lack the ability to use affective empathy. People who score highly on psychopathy measures are less likely to exhibit affective empathy. There was a strong negative correlation, showing that psychopathy and lack of affective empathy correspond strongly. {{ safesubst:#invoke:Unsubst||date=__DATE__ |$B= The DANVA-2{{#invoke:Category handler|main}}{{#invoke:Category handler|main}}[clarification needed] }} found those who scored highly on the psychopathy scale do not lack in recognising emotion in facial expressions. Therefore, such individuals do not lack in perspective-talking ability but do lack in compassion {{ safesubst:#invoke:Unsubst||date=__DATE__ |$B= and the negative incidents that happen to others{{#invoke:Category handler|main}}{{#invoke:Category handler|main}}[clarification needed] }}.[85]

Neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio and his colleagues showed that subjects with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex lack the ability to empathically feel their way to moral answers, and that when confronted with moral dilemmas, these brain-damaged patients coldly came up with "end-justifies-the-means" answers, leading Damasio to conclude that the point was not that they reached immoral conclusions, but that when they were confronted by a difficult issue – in this case as whether to shoot down a passenger plane hijacked by terrorists before it hits a major city – these patients appear to reach decisions without the anguish that afflicts those with normally functioning brains. According to Adrian Raine, a clinical neuroscientist also at the University of Southern California, one of this study's implications is that society may have to rethink how it judges immoral people: "Psychopaths often feel no empathy or remorse. Without that awareness, people relying exclusively on reasoning seem to find it harder to sort their way through moral thickets. Does that mean they should be held to different standards of accountability?"[86]

Despite studies suggesting psychopaths have deficits in emotion perception and imagining others in pain, professor Simon Baron-Cohen claims psychopathy is associated with intact cognitive empathy, which would imply an intact ability to read and respond to behaviors, social cues, and what others are feeling. Psychopathy is, however, associated with impairment in the other major component of empathy—affective (emotional) empathy—which includes the ability to feel the suffering and emotions of others (emotional contagion), and those with the condition are therefore not distressed by the suffering of their victims. Such a dissociation of affective and cognitive empathy has been demonstrated for aggressive offenders.[87]

Other conditions

Atypical empathic responses are also correlated with a variety of other conditions.

Borderline personality disorder is characterized by extensive behavioral and interpersonal difficulties that arise from emotional and cognitive dysfunction.[88] Dysfunctional social and interpersonal behavior plays a role in the emotionally intense way people with borderline personality disorder react.[89] While individuals with borderline personality disorder may show their emotions excessively, their ability to feel empathy is a topic of much dispute with contradictory findings. Some studies assert impairments in cognitive empathy in BPD patients yet no affective empathy impairments, while other studies have found impairments in both affective and cognitive empathy. Fluctuating empathy, fluctuating between normal range of empathy, reduced sense of empathy, and a lack of empathy has been noted to be present in BPD patients in multiple studies, although more research is needed to determine its prevalence, although it is believed to be at least not uncommon and may be a very common phenomenon. BPD is a very heterogenous disorder, with symptoms including empathy ranging wildly between patients.

One diagnostic criterion of narcissistic personality disorder is a lack of empathy and an unwillingness or inability to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.[90]

Characteristics of schizoid personality disorder include emotional coldness, detachment, and impaired affect corresponding with an inability to be empathic and sensitive towards others.[91]

A study conducted by Jean Decety and colleagues at the University of Chicago demonstrated that subjects with aggressive conduct disorder demonstrate atypical empathic responses when viewing others in pain.[54] Subjects with conduct disorder were at least as responsive as controls to the pain of others but, unlike controls, subjects with conduct disorder showed strong and specific activation of the amygdala and ventral striatum (areas that enable a general arousing effect of reward), yet impaired activation of the neural regions involved in self-regulation and metacognition (including moral reasoning), in addition to diminished processing between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.[54]

Schizophrenia is characterized by impaired affective empathy,[19] as well as severe cognitive and empathy impairments as measured by the Empathy Quotient (EQ).[53] These empathy impairments are also associated with impairments in social cognitive tasks.[53]

Bipolar individuals have impaired cognitive empathy and theory of mind, but increased affective empathy.[19][92] Despite cognitive flexibility being impaired, planning behavior is intact. Dysfunctions in the prefrontal cortex could result in the impaired cognitive empathy, since impaired cognitive empathy has been related with neurocognitive task performance involving cognitive flexibility.[92]

Dave Grossman, in his book On Killing, reports on how military training artificially creates depersonalization in soldiers, suppressing empathy and making it easier for them to kill other people.[55]

A deadening of empathic response to workmates, customers and the like is one of the three key components of occupational burnout, according to the conceptualisation behind its primary diagnostic instrument, the Maslach Burnout Inventory.

The term Empathy Deficit Disorder (EDD) has gained popularity online, but it is not a diagnosis under the DSM-5. The term was coined in an article by Douglas LaBier.[93] In the article, he acknowledges that he "made it up, so you won't find it listed in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" and that his conclusions are derived from personal experience alone.[93] His conclusions have not been validated through clinical studies, nor have studies identified EDD as a separate disorder rather than a symptom associated with previously established diagnoses that do appear in the DSM-5.

Practical issues

The capacity to empathize is a revered trait in society.[10] Empathy is considered a motivating factor for unselfish, prosocial behavior,[94] whereas a lack of empathy is related to antisocial behavior.[10][95]

An empathizer's emotional background may affect or distort how they perceive the emotions in others.[96] The judgments that empathy provides about the emotional states of others are not certain ones. Empathy is a skill that gradually develops throughout life.

Empathizers report finding it easier to take the perspective of another person in a situation when they have experienced a similar situation,[97] and that they experience greater empathic understanding.[98] Research regarding whether similar past experience makes the empathizer more accurate is mixed.[97][98]


In educational contexts

Another growing focus of investigation is how empathy manifests in education between teachers and learners.[99] Although there is general agreement that empathy is essential in educational settings, research found that it is difficult to develop empathy in trainee teachers.[100]

In intercultural contexts

According to one theory, empathy is one of seven components involved in the effectiveness of intercultural communication. This theory also states that empathy is learnable. However, research also shows that people experience more difficulty empathizing with others who are different from them in characteristics such as status, culture, religion, language, skin colour, gender, and age.[100]

To build intercultural empathy in others, psychologists employ empathy training. Researchers William Weeks, Paul Pedersen, et al. state that people who develop intercultural empathy can interpret experiences or perspectives from more than one worldview.[101] Intercultural empathy can also improve self-awareness and critical awareness of one's own interaction style as conditioned by one's cultural views and promote a view of self-as-process.[102]

Benefits of empathizing

People who score more highly on empathy questionnaires also report having more positive relationships with other people. They report "greater life satisfaction, more positive affect, less negative affect, and less depressive symptoms than people who had lower empathy scores".[103]

Children who exhibit more empathy also have more resilience.[104]

Empathy can be an aesthetic pleasure, "by widening the scope of that which we experience... by providing us with more than one perspective of a situation, thereby multiplying our experience... and... by intensifying that experience."[23] People can use empathy to borrow joy from the joy of children discovering things or playing make-believe, or to satisfy our curiosity about other people's lives.[105]

Empathic inaccuracy

People can severely overestimate how much they understand others.[106] When people empathize with another, they may oversimplify that other person in order to make them more legible.[23] It may improve empathic accuracy for the empathizer to explicitly ask the person empathized with for confirmation of the empathic hypothesis.[18] However, people may be reluctant to abandon their empathic hypotheses even when they are explicitly denied.[23]

Because we oversimplify people in order to make them legible enough to empathize with, we can come to misapprehend how cohesive other people are. We may come to think of ourselves as lacking a strong, integral self in comparison. Fritz Breithaupt calls this the "empathic endowment effect". Because the empathic person must temporarily dampen their own sense of self in order to empathize with the other, and because the other seems to have a magnified and extra-cohesive sense of self, the empathic person may suffer from this and may "project onto others the self that they are lacking" and envy "that which they must give up in order to be able to feel empathy: a strong self".[23]

Problems

Some research suggests that people are more able and willing to empathize with those most similar to themselves.[107] In particular, empathy increases with similarities in culture and living conditions. Empathy is also more likely to occur between individuals whose interaction is more frequent.[108][29]

Psychologist Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy, points out that this bias can result in tribalism and violent responses in the name of helping people of the same "tribe" or social group, for example when empathic bias is exploited. Bloom believes improper use of empathy and social intelligence can lead to shortsighted actions and parochialism. Empathy can encourage unethical behavior when it causes people to care more about attractive people than ugly people, or people of one's own race vs. people of a different race.[109][15]

Empathic distress fatigue

Excessive empathy can lead to "empathic distress fatigue", especially if it is associated with pathological altruism. The risks are fatigue, occupational burnout, guilt, shame, anxiety, and depression.[110]

Tania Singer says that health care workers and caregivers must be objective regarding the emotions of others. They should not over-invest their own emotions in the other, at the risk of draining away their own resourcefulness.[111] Paul Bloom points out that high-empathy nurses tend to spend less time with their patients, to avoid feeling negative emotions associated with witnessing suffering.[109]

Breithaupt emphasizes the importance of empathy suppression mechanisms in healthy empathy.[23] People who understand how empathic feelings evoke altruistic motivation may adopt strategies for suppressing or avoiding such feelings. People can better cognitively control their actions the more they understand how altruistic behavior emerges, whether it is from minimizing sadness or the arousal of mirror neurons.

In fiction

“The greatest benefits we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.… Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.”

Lynn Hunt argued in Inventing Human Rights: A History that the concept of human rights developed how it did and when it did in part as a result of the influence of mid-eighteenth-century European novelists, particularly those whose use of the epistolatory novel form gave readers a more vivid sense that they were gaining access to the candid details of a real life. "The epistolatory novel did not just reflect important cultural and social changes of the time. Novel reading actually helped create new kinds of feelings including a recognition of shared psychological experiences, and these feelings then translated into new cultural and social movements including human rights."[112]

The power of empathy has become a frequent ability in fiction, specifically in that of superhero media. "Empaths" have the ability to sense/feel the emotions and bodily sensations of others and, in some cases, influence or control them. Although sometimes a specific power held by specific characters such as the Marvel Comics character Empath, the power has also been frequently linked to that of telepathy such as in the case of Jean Grey.

The rebooted television series Charmed portrays the character Maggie Vera as a witch with the power of empathy. Her powers later expand to allow her to control the emotions of others as well as occasionally concentrate emotion into pure energy. In season four she learns to replicate people's powers by empathically understanding them.


Notes

  1. ↑ empathy (n.) Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved December 6, 2023.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Elizabeth A. Segal, Karen E. Gerdes, Cynthia A. Lietz, M. Alex Wagaman, and Jennifer M. Geiger, Assessing Empathy (Columbia University Press, 2017, ISBN 9780231181914).
  3. ↑ Edward Bradford Titchener, Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes (Legare Street Press, 2022 (original 1909), ISBN 1015885470).
  4. ↑ Susan Lanzoni, Empathy: A History (Yale University Press, 2018, ISBN 978-0300222685).
  5. ↑ Sara D. Hodges and Kristi J.K. Klein, Regulating the costs of empathy: the price of being human The Journal of Socio-Economics 30 (2001): 437– 452. Retrieved December 26, 2023.
  6. ↑ Clara Strauss, Billie Lever Taylor, Jenny Gu, Willem Kuyken, Ruth Baer, Fergal Jones, and Kate Cavanagh, What is compassion and how can we measure it? A review of definitions and measures Clinical Psychology Review 47 (July 2016):15-27. Retrieved December 26, 2023.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Jean Decety and Williams Icles (eds.) The Social Neuroscience of Empathy (MIT Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0262012973).
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Amy Coplan, Will the real empathy please stand up? A case for a narrow conceptualization The Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (September 2011):40–65. Retrieved December 26, 2023.
  9. ↑ Babette Rothschild and Marjorie Rand, Help for the Helper: The psychophysiology of compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma (W. W. Norton & Company, 2006, ISBN 978-0393704228).
  10. ↑ 10.00 10.01 10.02 10.03 10.04 10.05 10.06 10.07 10.08 10.09 10.10 10.11 10.12 Kimberley Rogers, Isabel Dziobek, Jason Hassenstab, Oliver T. Wolf, and Antonio Convit, Who cares? Revisiting empathy in Asperger syndrome Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 37(4) (April 2007):709-715. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  11. ↑ Frans B.M. de Waal, Putting the altruism back into altruism: the evolution of empathy Annual Review of Psychology 59(1) (2008):279–300. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 Mark H. Davis, Measuring individual differences in empathy: evidence for a multidimensional approach Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44(1) (1983):113–126. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 Chris Lamm, C. Daniel Batson, and Jean Decety, The neural substrate of human empathy: effects of perspective-taking and cognitive appraisal Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19(1) (2007):42–58. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Martin L. Hoffman, Empathy and Justic Motivation Motivation and Emotion 14(2) (1990):151–172. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 (January 2017) Empathy and Its Discontents. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 21 (1): 24–31.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: The Truth About The Male And Female Brain (Basic Books, 2003, ISBN 978-0738208442).
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Brett A. Murphy and Scott O. Lilienfeld, Are self-report cognitive empathy ratings valid proxies for cognitive empathy ability? Negligible meta-analytic relations with behavioral task performance Psychological Assessment 31(8) (August 2019):1062–1072. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Karla McLaren, The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill (Sounds True, 2013, ISBN 978-1622030613).
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 19.3 19.4 19.5 19.6 Christine L. Cox, Lucina Q. Uddin, Adriana Di Martino, F. Xavier Castellanos, Michael P. Milham, and Clare Kelly, The balance between feeling and knowing: affective and cognitive empathy are reflected in the brain's intrinsic functional dynamics Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 7(6) (2012):727–737. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  20. ↑ Simon Baron-Cohen and Sally Wheelwright, The empathy quotient: an investigation of adults with Asperger syndrome or high functioning autism, and normal sex differences Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 34(2) (April 2004):163–175. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  21. ↑ Renate L.E.P. Reniers, Rhiannon Corcoran, Richard Drake, Nick M. Shryane, and Birgit A. Völlm, The QCAE: a Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy Journal of Personality Assessment 93(1) (January 2011):84–95. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  22. ↑ Marco Innamorati, Sjoerd J.H. Ebisch, Vittorio Gallese, and Aristide Saggino, A bidimensional measure of empathy: Empathic Experience Scale PLOS ONE 14(4) (April 2019). Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 23.2 23.3 23.4 23.5 Fritz Breithaupt, The Dark Sides of Empathy (Cornell University Press, 2019, ISBN 978-1501721649).
  24. ↑ Zdravko Marjanovic, C. Ward Struthers, and Esther R. Greenglass, Who Helps Natural-Disaster Victims? Assessment of Trait and Situational Predictors Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 12(1) (August 8, 2011):245–267. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  25. ↑ Christopher J. Einolf, Is Cognitive Empathy More Important than Affective Empathy? A Response to 'Who Helps Natural-Disaster Victims?' Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 12(1) (March 13, 2012):268–271. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  26. ↑ C. Daniel Batson and and Tecia Moran, Empathy-induced altruism in a prisoner's dilemma European Journal of Social Psychology 29(7) (1999):909–924. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  27. ↑ C.R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez, Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0195187243).
  28. ↑ Christopher J Einolf, Empathic concern and prosocial behaviors: A test of experimental results using survey data Social Science Research 37(4) (2008):1267–1279.
  29. ↑ 29.0 29.1 Martin L. Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development (Cambridge University Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0521580342).
  30. ↑ Melanie Killen and Judith G. Smetana (eds.), Handbook of Moral Development (Routledge, 2022, ISBN 978-0367497545).
  31. ↑ 31.0 31.1 Jean Decety, Kalina J Michalska, and Yuko Akitsuki, Who caused the pain? An fMRI investigation of empathy and intentionality in children Neuropsychologia 46(11) (September 2008):2607–2614. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  32. ↑ 32.0 32.1 Jennifer Katherine Bosson, Camille E. Buckner, and Joseph Alan Vandello, The Psychology of Sex and Gender (SAGE Publications, Inc, 2021, ISBN 978-1544393995).
  33. ↑ William Ickes (ed.), Empathic Accuracy (The Guilford Press, 1997, ISBN 978-1572301610).
  34. ↑ Carl Rogers, Harold C. Lyon, and Reinhard Tausch, On Becoming an Effective Teacher (Routledge, 2013, ISBN 978-0415816984).
  35. ↑ James D. Baird and Laurie Nadel, Happiness Genes: Unlock the Positive Potential Hidden in Your DNA (Weiser, 2010, ISBN 978-1601631053).
  36. ↑ Mark H. Davis, Carol Luce, and Stephen J. Kraus , The heritability of characteristics associated with dispositional empathy Journal of Personality 62(3) (September 1994):369–391. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  37. ↑ V. Warrier et al., Genome-wide meta-analysis of cognitive empathy: heritability, and correlates with sex, neuropsychiatric conditions and cognition Molecular Psychiatry 23(6) (June 2018):1402–1409. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  38. ↑ Suzanne Keen, A Theory of Narrative Empathy Narrative 14(3) (October 2006):207–236. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  39. ↑ Valeria Gazzola, Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, and Christian Keysers, Empathy and the somatotopic auditory mirror system in humans Current Biology 16(18) (September 2006):1824–1829. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  40. ↑ Yan Fan, Niall W. Duncan, Moritz de Greck, and Georg Northoff, Is there a core neural network in empathy? An fMRI based quantitative meta-analysis Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 35(3) (January 2011):903-911. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  41. ↑ 41.0 41.1 41.2 41.3 Simone G. Shamay-Tsoory, Judith Aharon-Peretz, and Daniella Perry, Two systems for empathy: a double dissociation between emotional and cognitive empathy in inferior frontal gyrus versus ventromedial prefrontal lesions Brain 132(Pt 3) (March 2009):617–627. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  42. ↑ Jason Marsh, Do mirror neurons give us empathy? Greater Good Magazine (March 29, 2012). Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  43. ↑ V.S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human (W.W. Norton & Company, 2011, ISBN 978-0393077827).
  44. ↑ Jean Decety, The neuroevolution of empathy Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1231(1) (August 2011):35–45. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  45. ↑ Jo Sandin, Bonobos: Encounters in Empathy (Zoological Society of Milwaukee & The Foundation for Wildlife Conservation, Inc., 2007, ISBN 978-0979415104).
  46. ↑ Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society (Souvenir Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0285638907).
  47. ↑ Deborah Custance and Jennifer Mayer, Empathic-like responding by domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) to distress in humans: an exploratory study Animal Cognition 15(5) (September 2012):851–859. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  48. ↑ (August 2013) Acute lesions that impair affective empathy. Brain 136 (Pt 8): 2539–49.
  49. ↑ (2012-07-01) Changes in emotional empathy, affective responsivity, and behavior following severe traumatic brain injury. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology 34 (6): 606–23.
  50. ↑ (October 2010) Why don't you feel how I feel? Insight into the absence of empathy after severe traumatic brain injury. Neuropsychologia 48 (12): 3585–95.
  51. ↑ 51.0 51.1 "Letters", December 30, 2005.
  52. ↑ 52.0 52.1 (2011) Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty. Penguin UK. ISBN 9780713997910. 
  53. ↑ 53.0 53.1 53.2 (July 2008) Empathic abilities in people with schizophrenia. Psychiatry Research 160 (1): 23–9.
  54. ↑ 54.0 54.1 54.2 (February 2009) Atypical empathic responses in adolescents with aggressive conduct disorder: a functional MRI investigation. Biological Psychology 80 (2): 203–11.
  55. ↑ 55.0 55.1 (1996) On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Back Bay Books. ISBN 978-0-316-33000-8. 
  56. ↑ (2002-12-01)Childhood Victimization and Lack of Empathy as Predictors of Sexual Offending Against Women and Children. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 17 (12): 1291–1307.
  57. ↑ 57.0 57.1 (April 2004)Brief report: cognitive processing of own emotions in individuals with autistic spectrum disorder and in their relatives. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 34 (2): 229–35.
  58. ↑ Template:Multiref2
  59. ↑ (September 2007) Empathy and judging other's pain: an fMRI study of alexithymia. Cerebral Cortex 17 (9): 2223–34.
  60. ↑ (2005). Emotional Intelligence and Relationship Quality Among Couples. Personal Relationships 12 (2): 197–212.
  61. ↑ (January 2003) An examination of couples' difficulties with emotional expressiveness and their marital satisfaction. The Journal of Family Communication 3 (1): 41–62.
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  63. ↑ (January 2006) Understanding emotions in others: mirror neuron dysfunction in children with autism spectrum disorders. Nature Neuroscience 9 (1): 28–30.
  64. ↑ (July 2005) EEG evidence for mirror neuron dysfunction in autism spectrum disorders. Brain Research. Cognitive Brain Research 24 (2): 190–8.
  65. ↑ (2005) "Understanding others: Imitation, language, empathy", Perspectives on imitation: From cognitive neuroscience to social science, 77–99. 
  66. ↑ Template:Multiref2
  67. ↑ (2009). The empathy imbalance hypothesis of autism: A theoretical approach to cognitive and emotional empathy in autistic development. The Psychological Record 59: 489–510.
  68. ↑ (August 2009) Goals, intentions and mental states: challenges for theories of autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and Allied Disciplines 50 (8): 881–92.
  69. ↑ 69.0 69.1 (March 2009) Autism: the empathizing-systemizing (E-S) theory. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1156 (The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience 2009): 68–80.
  70. ↑ (February 2009)Fetal testosterone and autistic traits. British Journal of Psychology 100 (Pt 1): 1–22.
  71. ↑ Milton, Damian E.M. (August 16, 2012). On the ontological status of autism: the 'double empathy problem'. Disability & Society 27 (6): 883–7.
  72. ↑ (2011) "The development of empathy: How, when, and why", Moral Behavior and Free Will: A Neurobiological and Philosophical Aprroach, 341–68. 
  73. ↑ Template:Multiref2
  74. ↑ Template:Multiref2
  75. ↑ Template:Multiref2
  76. ↑ 76.0 76.1 "Psychopathy" by Quinton 2006Template:Full citation needed
  77. ↑ 77.0 77.1 (December 2001)Somatic markers and response reversal: is there orbitofrontal cortex dysfunction in boys with psychopathic tendencies?. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 29 (6): 499–511.
  78. ↑ 78.0 78.1 (November 2002)Turning a deaf ear to fear: impaired recognition of vocal affect in psychopathic individuals. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 111 (4): 682–6.
  79. ↑ 79.0 79.1 (June 2001)Recognition of emotion in facial expressions and vocal tones in children with psychopathic tendencies. The Journal of Genetic Psychology 162 (2): 201–11.
  80. ↑ Template:Multiref2
  81. ↑ Template:Multiref2
  82. ↑ Template:Multiref2
  83. ↑ (June 2013) Brain response to empathy-eliciting scenarios involving pain in incarcerated individuals with psychopathy. JAMA Psychiatry 70 (6): 638–45.
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  85. ↑ (2006). Psychopathy, Empathy, and Perspective -Taking Ability in a Community Sample: Implications for the Successful Psychopathy Concept. International Journal of Forensic Mental Health 5 (2): 133–49.
  86. ↑ Vedantam, Shankar, "If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural", May 28, 2007.
  87. ↑ (April 2017) Social cognition in aggressive offenders: Impaired empathy, but intact theory of mind. Scientific Reports 7 (1).
  88. ↑ (February 2006)Reduced Self-Referential Source Memory Performance is Associated with Interpersonal Dysfunction in Borderline Personality Disorder. Journal of Personality Disorders 20 (1): 42–54.
  89. ↑ (February 2010) Double dissociation between cognitive and affective empathy in borderline personality disorder. Psychiatry Research 175 (3): 277–9.
  90. ↑ 2000, "Diagnostic criteria for 301.81 Narcissistic Personality Disorder", Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fourth (DSM-IV-TR) ed.), American Psychiatric Association 
  91. ↑ Template:Multiref2
  92. ↑ 92.0 92.1 (2009). Neuropsychological evidence of impaired cognitive empathy in euthymic bipolar disorder. The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 21 (1): 59–67.
  93. ↑ 93.0 93.1 LaBier, Douglas. Are You Suffering From Empathy Deficit Disorder? (in en).
  94. ↑ (January 1987)The relation of empathy to prosocial and related behaviors. Psychological Bulletin 101 (1): 91–119.
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  96. ↑ (2005) Emotional intelligence (in da). New York: Bantam Books. ISBN 978-0-553-38371-3. OCLC 61770783. 
  97. ↑ 97.0 97.1 (2015). Perspective taking and empathy: Does having similar past experience to another person make it easier to take their perspective?. Journal of Relationships Research 6: e10, 1–14.
  98. ↑ 98.0 98.1 (March 2010)Giving birth to empathy: the effects of similar experience on empathic accuracy, empathic concern, and perceived empathy. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin 36 (3): 398–409.
  99. ↑ (2014) Critical perspectives on language education: Australia and the Asia Pacific. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 71–100. ISBN 9783319061856. 
  100. ↑ 100.0 100.1 (2007). Pre-service teachers' empathy and cognitions: Statistical analysis of text data by graphical models. Contemporary Educational Psychology 32 (1): 48–82.
  101. ↑ (1979) A Manual of Structured Experiences for Cultural Learning. La Grange Park, Ill.: Intercultural Network. 
  102. ↑ (2016) Developing Cultural Diversity Competency. University of Portland. 
  103. ↑ Grühn, D. (2008). Empathy across the adult lifespan: Longitudinal and experience-sampling findings. Emotion 8 (6): 753–65.
  104. ↑ Bernard, B. (2004). Resiliency: What we have learned. 
  105. ↑ Bloom, Paul (2016). Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. 
  106. ↑ (2022). The extreme illusion of understanding.. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 151 (11): 2957–62.
  107. ↑ (2010). Mere socialization categorization modulates identification of facial expressions of emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 99 (6): 964–77.
  108. ↑ (1997) "Physiological aspects of emotional knowledge and rapport.", Empathic Accuracy. New York, N.Y.: The Guilford Press, 44–72. ISBN 978-1-57230-161-0. 
  109. ↑ 109.0 109.1 Template:Cite podcast
  110. ↑ {{cite book | vauthors = Klimecki O, Singer T | author-link2 = Tania Singer | chapter = Empathic distress fatigue rather than compassion fatigue? Integrating findings from empathy research in psychology and social neuroscience | veditors = Oakley B, Knafo A, Madhavan G, Wilson DS | author-link1 = Barbara Oakley | title = Pathological Altruism | publisher = Oxford University Press| location = U.S. | year = 2012 | isbn = 978-0-19-973857-1 | chapter-url = https://legiochristi.com/static/lit/Pathological_Altruism.pdf#page=77 | pages = 368–83
  111. ↑ {{#invoke:Citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=magazine }}
  112. ↑ Template:Multiref2

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • Baird, James D., and Laurie Nadel. Happiness Genes: Unlock the Positive Potential Hidden in Your DNA. Weiser, 2010. ISBN 978-1601631053
  • Baron-Cohen, Simon. The Essential Difference: The Truth About The Male And Female Brain. Basic Books, 2003. ISBN 978-0738208442
  • Bar-On, Reuven, and James D. A. Parker (eds.). The Handbook of Emotional Intelligence : Theory, Development, Assessment, and Application at Home, School and in the Workplace. Jossey-Bass, 2000. ISBN 978-0787949846
  • Bosson, Jennifer Katherine, Camille E. Buckner, and Joseph Alan Vandello. The Psychology of Sex and Gender. SAGE Publications, Inc, 2021. ISBN 978-1544393995
  • Breithaupt, Fritz, Andrew B. B. Hamilton (trans.). The Dark Sides of Empathy. Cornell University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1501721649
  • de Waal, Frans. The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. Souvenir Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0285638907
  • Decety, Jean, and Williams Icles (eds.). The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. MIT Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0262012973
  • Hoffman, Martin L. Empathy and Moral Development. Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN 978-0521580342
  • Ickes, William (ed.). Empathic Accuracy. The Guilford Press, 1997. ISBN 978-1572301610
  • Killen, Melanie, and Judith G. Smetana (eds.). Handbook of Moral Development. Routledge, 2022. ISBN 978-0367497545
  • Lanzoni, Susan. Empathy: A History. Yale University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0300222685
  • McLaren, Karla. The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill. Sounds True, 2013. ISBN 978-1622030613
  • Ramachandran, V.S. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human. W.W. Norton & Company, 2011. ISBN 978-0393077827
  • Rogers, Carl, Harold C. Lyon, and Reinhard Tausch. On Becoming an Effective Teacher. Routledge, 2013. ISBN 978-0415816984
  • Rothschild, Babette, and Marjorie Rand. Help for the Helper: The psychophysiology of compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma. W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. ISBN 978-0393704228
  • Sandin, Jo. Bonobos: Encounters in Empathy. Zoological Society of Milwaukee & The Foundation for Wildlife Conservation, Inc., 2007. ISBN 978-0979415104
  • Segal, Elizabeth A., Karen E. Gerdes, Cynthia A. Lietz, M. Alex Wagaman, and Jennifer M. Geiger. Assessing Empathy. Columbia University Press, 2017. ISBN 9780231181914
  • Snyder, C.R., and Shane J. Lopez. Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology. Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0195187243
  • Titchener, Edward Bradford. Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes. Legare Street Press, 2022 (original 1909). ISBN 1015885470

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