Here we start to see why the term empathy has been and still is heavily debated. The definition above encompasses so much and is used in a wide variety of settings and disciplines that it is hard to know what people actually mean when they use the world empathy. Can the empathy that was found in this study showing pro-social behaviors in rats really be the same empathy that Obama talked about in his commencement speech at Northwestern University stating that "empathy-deficit" between partisan groups is a bigger concern than that federal deficit. The issues comes from empathy having both biological and cognitive components to it and those components can be broken down even further into subcategories which can all be classified as different forms of empathy. The use of the world empathy to describe a multitude of factors can be, not just confusing, but problematic, as in this Yale professor and psychologist, Paul Bloom, making the case that we should be against empathy. He argues that empathy can lead us to make decisions based on compassion and generosity to specific individuals, generally ones from our in-group, at the expense of helping more people. Instead of analyzing what type of empathy leads humans to making those choices, he claims that empathy as a whole is a problem and we should ditch it. This is were it is imperative to look at the multiple forms empathy takes.
Well that's a little broad
Evolutionary
The ability to feel another's pain is deep-rooted in our evolutionary history and is a key factor in our ancestors survival. This can be seen in our need to be sensitive to the needs of our offspring in order to keep prolong our species existence. Also, our species depends on cooperation, which means that we do better if we are surrounded by healthy, capable group mates therefore taking care of others in also due to self-interest. Empathy is not, as some may assume, unique to humans. Recent studies done mammals, specifically apes, have shown that the basic brain processes that led to empathy predate the human species.
A (brief) History of Empathy
Empathy in Contemporary Discourse
Since the introduction of the term empathy in 1909, a vast amount of theories have emerged attempting to understand the different biological, neurological, cognitive, emotional components of empathy and if, or how, they interact with each other. Early 20th century discourse around empathy primarily looked at the affective, or emotional, component of empathy, originating from the philosophers such as Theodor Lipps. During the late 1920's, there was a shift to studying empathy as a cognitive process rather than an emotional one, which is credited to psychologists such as Doris Bischof-Köhler (1929), Mead (1934) and Piaget (1932). Theories, such as Simulation Theory and Theory of Mind, emerged on either side of the discourse that have been used to explain why these processes happen. After WWII, there was a push to integrate the emotional and cognitive complements and to study empathy as an interdependent system for psychologists such as Rogers, Kohut, Hoffman, Eisenberg. Another important milestone in the study of empathy was the discovery of Mirror Neurons in 1990 by the Neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti when conducting a study on monkeys. He discovered that there were individual neurons that would fire both when the monkey would grab an object and when it observed another monkey grabbing an object. This lead to investigating if humans have these neurons as well and, although there haven't been individual mirroring neurons found, humans do have a mirroring systems which supports Simulation Theory and has lead to a lot of research behind the neuroscience of empathy.
This was a very brief, incomplete, history of the study of empathy but it important to have a basic understanding of it in while looking at the current discourse around empathy. Although there is not an agreed upon definition of empathy, there is a consensus that is consists of two main components:
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Cognitive Empathy: the sensations and feelings we get in response to others’ emotions
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Affective Empathy: our ability to identify and understand other peoples’ emotions
These two categories care further broken down
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Emotional contagion: Directly feeling what someone else is feeling.
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Fantasy or Imagining yourself in others’ shoes: mentally placing yourself in someone else’s situation or circumstance and imagining how you’d respond
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Perspective-taking: attempint to understand others from their own perspective
-This skill is valuable in resolving conflicts, maintaining peace, developing relationships, and working in teams
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Emphatic accuracy: sometimes researchers call this “mind reading.” It involves being good at reading others’ emotions and body language, rather than imagining what the world is like from their perspective
em·pa·thy (ˈempəTHē/)
noun
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the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.