What is empathy?

(Oxford dictionary) the ability to understand another person’s feelings, experience, etc.

(Cambridge dictionary) the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation

(Collins dictionary) Empathy is the ability to share another person's feelings and emotions as if they were your own.

(Encyclopaedia Britannica) Empathy, the ability to imagine oneself in another’s place and understand the other’s feelings, desires, ideas, and actions.

(Psychology today) Empathy is the visceral experience of another person's thoughts and feelings from his or her point of view, rather than from one's own.

Empathy is a multidimensional construct and requires the ability to perceive, understand, and feel the emotional states of others. According to most models empathy consists of at least three core components: 

• (1) The ability to recognize emotions in oneself and others via different communicative cues such as facial expressions, speech, or behavior; 
• (2) a cognitive component, also referred to as perspective taking or theory of mind, describing the competency to take over the perspective of another person, though maintaining the essential distinction between self and other; and 
• (3) an affective component, that is, sharing of emotional states with others or the ability to experience similar emotions as others.

Author links open overlay panelAuthor links open overlay panelBirgit Derntl and Christina Regenbogen. Empathy. Social Cognition and Metacognition in Schizophrenia, Psychopathology and Treatment Approaches. 2014, Pages 69-81

The term empathy is common across a variety of disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, and sociology. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that there are a number of definitions for the term.

Nicholas M.Thompson et al. Empathy. Neuroimaging Personality, Social Cognition, and Character 2016, Pages 289-303

Empathy has been defined in two ways:

• (a) the cognitive awareness of another person's internal states (thoughts, feelings, perceptions, intentions); 
• (b) the vicarious affective response to another person.  Affective empathy was initially defined as a match between the observer's and the model's feeling. It is now defined as it is here, more in terms of the processes that make an observer's feelings congruent with the model's situation not his own (Hoffman 1978, 2000).

M.L. Hoffman. Prosocial Behavior and Empathy: Developmental Processes. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences 2001, Pages 12230-12233