What does empathy mean wikipedia

Our contributors award "Greater Goodies" to the TV shows that helped them to get through the pandemic. It is also a key ingredient of successful relationships because it helps us understand the perspectives, needs, and intentions of others. Here are some of the ways that research has testified to the far-reaching importance of empathy. For more: Learn about why we should teach empathy to preschoolers. From these early forms of empathy, research suggests we can develop more complex forms that go a long way toward improving our relationships and the world around us.

Here are some specific, science-based activities for cultivating empathy from our site Greater Good in Action :. And here are some of the keys that researchers have identified for nurturing empathy in ourselves and others:.

The initiative gave awards to 14 programs judged to do the best job at educating for empathy. The nonprofit Playworks also offers eight strategies for developing empathy in children. Does this reflect a defect in empathy itself? Some critics believe so , while others argue that the real problem is how we suppress our own empathy. Empathy, after all, can be painful. Doctors and caregivers are at particular risk of feeling emotionally overwhelmed by empathy.

In other cases, empathy seems to be detrimental. Sociopaths could use cognitive empathy to help them exploit or even torture people. Even if we are well-intentioned, we tend to overestimate our empathic skills.

Become a subscribing member today. Scroll To Top What is Empathy? Why Practice It? This is known as empathy overload , and is explained in more detail in our page on Understanding Others. Those with a tendency to become overwhelmed need to work on their self-regulation, and particularly their self-control , so that they become better able to manage their own emotions.

Good self-control helps doctors and nurses to avoid possible burnout from empathising too much. There have been several recent cases in the UK, such as in South Staffordshire, where nurses and others were accused of being uncaring. This may have been a possible result of over-protection against empathy overload. The name, compassionate empathy, is consistent with what we usually understand by compassion.

Like sympathy, compassion is about feeling concern for someone, but with an additional move towards action to mitigate the problem. Compassionate empathy is the type of empathy that is usually most appropriate.

Instead, they need you to understand and sympathise with what they are going through and, crucially, either take, or help them to take, action to resolve the problem, which is compassionate empathy. Understanding and Developing Emotional Intelligence. Learn more about emotional intelligence and how to effectively manage personal relationships at home, at work and socially. Our eBooks are ideal for anyone who wants to learn about or develop their interpersonal skills and are full of easy-to-follow, practical information.

It involves insufficient feeling, and therefore perhaps too much logical analysis. It may be perceived as an unsympathetic response by those in distress. Too much emotion or feeling can be unhelpful. As our page on Managing Emotions explains, emotions are very primitive. For instance, it is claimed that clinicians or caregivers must take care not to be too sensitive to the emotions of others, to over-invest their own emotions, at the risk of draining away their own resourcefulness.

There are also concerns that the empathiser's own emotional background may affect or distort what emotions they perceive in others. Empathy is not a process that is likely to deliver certain judgements about the emotional states of others.

It is a skill that is gradually developed throughout life, and which improves the more contact we have with the person with whom we empathise. Accordingly, any knowledge we gain of the emotions of the other must be revisable in light of further information. Thus awareness of these limitations is prudent in a clinical or caregiving situation. When seeking to communicate with another, it may be helpful to demonstrate empathy with the other, to open-up the channel of communication with the other.

In this case two methods of empathy are possible:. Either way, full empathetic engagement is supposed to help to understand and anticipate the behavior of the other. Empathy may be painful to oneself: seeing the pain of others, especially as broadcasted by mass media , can cause one temporary or permanent clinical depression ; a phenomenon which is sometimes called weltschmerz. Without a basic emotional understanding of others there is no basis for relationship, therefore a tension struggle lies in the dilemma to protect oneself from the pain of empathy or seek to relate to other humans despite the potential risk of injury.

One must be careful not to confuse empathy with either sympathy , emotional contagion or telepathy. Sympathy is the feeling of compassion for another, the wish to see them better off or happier, often described as "feeling sorry" for someone.

Emotional contagion is when a person especially an infant or a member of a mob imitatively 'catches' the emotions that others are showing without necessarily recognising this is happening. Telepathy is a controversial paranormal phenomenon, whereby emotions or other mental states can be read directly, without needing to infer, or perceive expressive clues about the other person.

Sympathy is, "I'm sorry for your sadness, I wish to help. Some experts psychologists , psychiatrists , and other scientists believe that not all humans have an ability to feel empathy or perceive the emotions of others. For instance, Autism and related conditions such as Asperger's syndrome are often but not always characterized by an apparent reduced ability to empathize with others.

The interaction between empathy and autism spectrum disorders is a complex and ongoing field of research, and is discussed in detail below. According to Simon Baron-Cohen 's ideas, this absence might be related to an absence of theory of mind i. Again, not all autistics fit this pattern, and the theory remains controversial. In contrast, psychopaths are seemingly able to demonstrate the appearance of sensing the emotions of others with such a theory of mind, often demonstrating care and friendship in a convincing manner, and can use this ability to charm or manipulate, but they crucially lack the sympathy or compassion that empathy often leads to.

Empathy certainly does not guarantee benevolence. The same ability may underlie schadenfreude taking pleasure in the pain of another entity and sadism being sexually gratified through the infliction of pain or humiliation on another person. Moreover, some research suggests that people are more able and willing to empathize with those most similar to themselves.

In particular, empathy increases with similarities in culture and living conditions. We are also more likely to empathize with those with whom we interact more frequently See Levenson and Reuf and Hoffman Even more, people can empathize with animals. As such, empathy is thought to be a driving psychological force behind the animal rights movement an example of sympathy , whether or not using empathy is justified by any real similarity between the emotional experiences of animals and humans.

A common source of confusion in analyzing the interactions between empathy and ASD is that the apparent lack of empathy may mask at least two other underlying causes:. In this context, a higher level of empathy is sometimes reported by individuals with mild or high functioning Asperger's syndrome, especially to animals and to other deeply held emotions in people - anecdotally this may more often be so with "high-functioning" individuals, or possibly, the strength of negative empathic feelings with people might itself have been a contributing cause of retreat into self.

Some students of animal behavior claim that empathy is not restricted to humans as the definition implies. Examples include dolphins saving humans sympathy from drowning or from shark attacks, and a multitude of behaviors observed in primates , both in captivity and in the wild. Rodents have been shown to demonstrate empathy for cagemates but not strangers in pain. The study of empathic neuronal circuitries was inspired by the discovery of mirror neurons in monkeys that fire both when the creature watches another perform an action as well as when they themselves perform it presents a possible neural mechanism for mapping others' feelings onto one's own nervous system.

In Bower the function of these mirror cells was further investigated. They may be related to awareness of the goal-directedness of actions. These neurons "may be responsible for understanding the intention of action in other people," Kiyoshi Nakahara and Yasushi Miyashita, both of the University of Tokyo School of Medicine said in a note which accompanies the Bower action. Dapretto et al. The authors suggest this supports the hypothesis that a dysfunctional mirror neuron system may underlie the social deficits observed in autism.