All 5 Terms & Definitions
- Affective empathy
- The automatic tendency to share or resonate with another person's emotional state — feeling distressed when witnessing distress, feeling happy for someone's joy. Involves emotional contagion and is associated with activity in regions like the anterior insula and anterior cingulate. Distinct from cognitive empathy and does not require deliberate perspective-taking.
- Cognitive empathy
- The capacity to understand another person's emotional state — to know what they feel — without necessarily sharing it. Closely related to theory of mind and mentalising. Assessed by tasks like the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test (Baron-Cohen). Dissociable from affective empathy: psychopaths show relatively preserved cognitive empathy with impaired affective empathy; autistic individuals often show the reverse pattern.
- Empathy-altruism hypothesis
- Batson's proposal that empathic concern — other-focused emotion felt when perceiving another's need — produces genuinely altruistic motivation aimed at the other's welfare, not merely disguised self-interest. The hypothesis has been supported across numerous experimental paradigms in which escape was available (allowing participants to avoid distress without helping) but those high in empathic concern helped anyway.
- Mirror neurons
- Neurons first identified in macaque premotor cortex (Rizzolatti et al., 1996) that fire both when the monkey performs an action and when it observes the same action performed by another. Proposed as a neural substrate for affective empathy in humans. The "broken mirrors" hypothesis — that autism involves mirror neuron dysfunction — is now largely discredited, and strong versions of the mirror neuron theory of empathy have been substantially revised.
- Empathy fatigue
- A state of physical and emotional exhaustion resulting from repeated exposure to the suffering of others, common in nurses, therapists, and first responders. Characterised by reduced empathic responsiveness, emotional numbing, and symptoms resembling burnout or secondary traumatic stress. Distinct from compassion, which is more sustainable — compassion focuses on the wish to alleviate suffering rather than sharing in it.