POSITIVE ATTRIBUTES: Empathy

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

Empathy involves the ability to emotionally understand what another person is experiencing. Essentially, it is putting yourself in someone else's shoes and feeling what they must be feeling. When you see another person suffering, you might be able to instantly envision yourself in the other person's place and have an understanding for what they're going through.

For many, seeing another person in pain and responding with indifference or even outright hostility seems utterly incomprehensible. But the fact that some people do respond in such a way clearly demonstrates that empathy is not necessarily a universal response to the suffering of others.

Empathy is a learned behavior.  It develops over time by observing others behaving empathically and practicing the behavior.  The biological explanation is that empathy happens when two parts of the brain work together—the emotional center perceives the feelings of others and the cognitive center tries to understand why they feel that way and how we can be helpful to them. 

Research has shown that empathy makes people better family members and friends, managers and workers.  But it’s bigger than just its personal effect. We’re all in this together, and research shows that connection and compassion are crucial to a sustainable and humane future. 

According to VeryWellMind, there are different types of empathy that a person may experience:

• Affective empathy involves the ability to understand another person's emotions and respond appropriately.  Such emotional understand may lead to someone feeling concerned for another person's well-being, or it may lead to feelings of personal distress.

• Somatic empathy involves having a sort of physical reaction in response to what someone else is experiencing.  People sometimes physically experience what another person is feeling.  When you see someone feeling embarrassed, for example, you might start to blush or have an upset stomach.

• Cognitive empathy involves being able to understand another person's mental state and what they might be thinking in response to the situation.  This is related to what psychologists refer to as "theory of mind," or thinking about what other people are thinking.

Empathy is an important factor in building and having good character, and makes one a better person overall.  Imagine how our world would be changed if everyone knew how to be empathic and used it in all of their interactions.

We'd be in a much better place, to be sure.