Empathy

Heidi Maibom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780415790215
• eBook ISBN: 9781351818698
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Empathy is one of the most talked about and widely studied concepts of recent years. Some argue it can help create a more just society, improve medical care and even avert global catastrophe. Others object that it is morally problematic. Who is right? And what is empathy anyway? Is it a way of feeling with others, or is it simply feeling sorry for them? Is it a form of knowledge? What is its evolutionary origin?

In this thorough and clearly-written introduction to the philosophy of empathy Heidi Maibom explores these questions and more, examining the following topics:

• The nature of empathy and key themes in the literature
• Empathy as a way of understanding others, particularly 'simulation theory' and 'perspective-taking'
• Empathy, emotional contagion, and sympathy
• Empathy's role in moral understanding or motivation
• Empathy and art appreciation, with examples from film, music and fiction
• Empathy and mental disorder, such as psychopathy and autism.

Including chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary, Empathy is an excellent resource for students of philosophy of mind and psychology, psychology, and cognitive science, as well as for those in related subjects such as art, literature and politics.

1

What is empathy?

1.1 Empathic phenomena

1.2 Emotional contagion

1.3 Affective empathy

1.4 Cognitive empathy, or perspective taking

1.5 Sympathy or empathic concern

1.6 How empathy is measured

1.7 Take-home message

Empathy has come to prominence as a worthy subject for study over the last decades. Up until quite recently, it has not been a serious topic of philosophical research, with the notable exceptions of the Scottish sentimentalists and German phenomenologists. There is now a thriving philosophical literature on this affective reaction, in addition to a huge popular one extolling its many virtues. Although there are some detractors, empathy seems to be on the up and up. But what is empathy? Is it a feeling, or a way of understanding others? Does it involve feeling what the other person is feeling, or is it a form of compassion? Any reader who first immerses herself in this literature is likely to be confused. ‘Empathy’ is used in so many different senses that it is hard to form an overall view of what it is and what it does. The aim of this chapter is provide an account of the main phenomena that go under this heading.

There are two types of attitudes to empathy. There is the narrow attitude according to which there is one right way to look at what real empathic phenomena are (Coplan 2011). And then there is the broader, more encompassing view, which allows many different ideas in under the rubric ‘empathy,’ not because adherents are wishy-washy but because they maintain that these ideas are all intimately connected (Maibom 2017). If we explore one in isolation, the thought goes, we risk missing something very important about each phenomenon. You may now suspect that I belong in the second camp. You would be right. This book, therefore, offers a somewhat ecumenical account of empathic phenomena. It covers the phenomena often called empathy, sympathy, emotional contagion, and perspective taking.

This chapter starts out with an illustration of the problems facing a person trying to understand what empathy is by comparing and contrasting four different definitions in the literature. I then briefly explain each aspect of empathic responding in turn: emotional contagion, affective empathy, sympathy, and perspective taking. I end by saying a little about how empathy is measured in the psychology literature.

§1.1 Empathic phenomena

To give you a flavor of the diverse interpretations of the term ‘empathy,’ have a look at the definitions below. They are not cherry picked, I promise. Instead, they are regularly quoted and used in the literature in both philosophy and psychology.

(D1) “We define empathy as an affective response that stems from the apprehension or comprehension of another’s emotional state or condition and is similar to what the other person is feeling or would be expected to feel in a given situation.” (Eisenberg 2005, 75)

(D2) “[…] the three essential features of empathy: affective matching, other-oriented perspective taking, and self-other differentiation.” (Coplan 2011, 6)

(D3) “A perception-action model of empathy specifically states that attended perception of the object’s state automatically activates the subject’s representations of the state, situation, and object, and that activation of these representations automatically primes or generates the associated autonomic and somatic responses, unless inhibited.” (Preston & de Waal 2002, 4)

(D4) “Empathic concern refers to other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of a person in need.” (Batson 2014, 41)

At first blush, it may seem that these definitions are not really that different. And in a way they are not. They all describe emotions that are singularly sensitive to others. Empathy, it is clear, is an other-oriented state or activity. However, they differ in the ways they take these emotions to be other-oriented, as we shall see below.

The cause of empathy. (D1) and (D3) specify that the other person’s affective state is the cause of empathy. (D3) focuses on perception. In a typical instance, you express that you experience some emotion, and upon observing your expression, I come to experience an emotion of the same general type. For instance, I see you cry, and I come to feel sad. (D2) states that it is not enough that we see someone be sad; we must also take her perspective. That is, I must imagine that I am (her) in her situation. Perspective taking is often seen to be empathic in the psychological literature but is nonetheless different from feeling with and for others. (D1) has a slightly wider scope, for it takes into consideration that there are many different ways I can acquire information about your being sad, only one of which is seeing it for myself. For instance, I am told by a friend that you are sad. This makes me feel sad in turn. (D1) and (D2), as it turns out, also include as empathic my feeling sad when considering the situation you are in. In this case, I might actually not know what you feel, and there is the possibility that you do not feel sad at all. But, the thinking goes, it is fair to assume that the situation would make you feel sad, and so my sadness still counts as empathic. For example, I know that your spouse has left you for another person and that makes me feel sad for you.

Emotion matching. But not everybody has this focus on affect. (D4) is pretty clear that it is the overall welfare of the other person that is at issue, not what they happen to feel. In some ways, the thinking here is similar to the one above, where we assume that we can infer someone’s feelings from the situation they are in. The situation in this instance, though, is general welfare. Put simply, has something good or bad happened to the person? When our affective quality matches their welfare, we feel empathic concern. Suppose you have just been turned down for a long-awaited promotion. For me to empathize with you, I must experience a negative emotion in response to this information. As we shall see later, Daniel Batson, who is the proponent of this definition, has pretty precise ideas about the affective quality of empathic concern.

Self-other differentiation. Another important factor in distinguishing these accounts is the degree to which the empathizer is aware that she is empathizing. What does this mean? Well, if you look at (D3) you see that all that is required is that the empathizer attends to the target and she comes to feel the corresponding affect herself. She may or may not know that her emotion is empathic. In other words, she may not be aware that her emotion is about the other person. For instance, our empathizer may come to feel sad upon observing sadness in her friend but feel her sadness as her own. (D3) comes from people working on animal cognition. It is easy to see how well this account will fit some animal scenarios. By contrast, proposed by a philosopher, (D2) insists that empathy requires a robust self-other differentiation. According to this philosopher, (D3) would not describe empathy but what psychologists call emotional contagion. To get to empathy, we must ask: “Is one feeling sad, distressed, concerned for the other, or feeling this way as a result of what has befallen oneself—including the experience of seeing another suffer?” (Batson 2014, 42). Only in the former case is what we feel empathy, if we are to believe Dan Batson or Amy Coplan.

It should now be clear why many people complain about ‘empathy’ being an impossibly confused term. Different people mean different thing by it. But things are not as bad as they seem. Mainly, people have one of four slightly different things in mind when they talk about empathy. They are: 1) ‘emotional contagion,’ which is described in (D3), 2) ‘affective empathy,’ which is described in (D1) and (D2), 3) ‘perspective taking,’ sometimes called ‘cognitive empathy,’ which is central to (D2), and ‘sympathy,’ sometimes called ‘empathic concern’ (particularly in psychology), which is described in (D4). Let us briefly look at each.

§1.2 Emotional contagion

Imagine arriving at a party. The room is light and full of cheer. You immediately feel cheerful yourself. Or, walking down a path with a friend, she startles and you startle immediately as a result. If you have ever had an experience like these, you have experienced ‘emotional contagion.’ In emotional contagion, one person responds to another person’s emotion with a very similar one. In my examples, it was cheer and startle, but most researchers assume it can be any emotion. We don’t actually know that this is true, and there is some reason to be suspicious about that claim. Can we ‘catch’ someone’s jealousy or surprise? It’s not obvious.

The current evidence suggest that we can catch the following emotions from others: pain-related distress (Cheng et al. 2007, Singer et al. 2004), disgust (Jabbi, Bastiaansen, & Keysers 2008, Wicker et al. 2003), fear (Gelder et al. 2004), anger (de Greck et al. 2012), anxiety (Prehn-Kristensen et al. 2009), pleasure (Jabbi, Swart, & Keysers 2007), embarrassment (Krach et al. 2011), and sadness (Harrison et al. 2006). Most of this evidence comes from neuroscience studies. Technically speaking, all these studies show is that overlapping brain areas are activated when the person is feeling the emotion directly (or for themselves) and when they feel it as a result of others feeling it (for a review, see Bernhardt & Singer 2012).¹

Although you need to be able to pay some attention to what others feel in order to catch their emotions—you can’t do it while sleeping or high on drugs, for instance—you don’t need to know that this is what you are doing. We may be aware that the person we are interacting with is cheerful and that we are cheerful but not of any causal connection between the two. Our attention is directed more or less automatically, and this process may not be under conscious control at all during the initial stages of emotional contagion. We can, of course, become aware of what is happening. When we do so, however, the resultant affect is more likely to fit (D1) or (D2) in addition to (D3), as we shall see in the next section.

§1.3 Affective empathy

One way of looking at affective empathy is simply as emotional contagion plus. It is emotional contagion with a robust self-other differentiation. Suppose your friend is angrily telling you about how she was snubbed by her boss. You feel your anger rising. You are angry with her boss too now. But you know you are angry because of what happened to your friend. Your anger is not yours in a deep sense. It is empathic. (D3) has become (D1). The self-differentiation demanded by (D1) and (D2) should therefore not be understood as merely involving knowing that you and your friend are two different people but knowing that she is the one who has been snubbed (in our example). You are angry for your friend, we might say, not for yourself. This is true despite the fact that you are actually angry yourself.

The easiest way to conceptualize this is to say that the object of your anger is your friend’s anger, along with the content of her anger perhaps. For suppose you are angry that your friend is angry that her boss snubbed her. This may sound like empathic anger, but it needn’t be. You might have been angered by her anger, not because of what her boss did but because her ranting and raving have made you mad too. You feel angry with her, however, not for her. Empathic affect, then, needs to have as an object the other person’s affect, or something like that (soon to be discussed), and be directed not at the target but at the person, situation, or event that caused the target’s affect in the first place.

Most agree that empathic affect is not only caused by perceiving the other person’s affect, as described in (D3). It can also be aroused simply by imagining being in her situation (e.g. Maibom 2007, Sober & Wilson 1998), or by knowing that the other person feels sad or that she is in a bad situation, (D3) notwithstanding. (D1)–(D3) all require emotion matching also. In other words, if you...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. What is empathy?
• 2. Empathy and understanding others
• 3. Empathy and feeling for and with others
• 4. Empathy and morality
• 5. Empathy and art
• 6. Empathy and mental disorder
• 7. The future of empathy studies
• Glossary
• Index