Empathy is the capacity to recognize emotions that are being experienced by another being. One may need to have a certain amount of empathy before being able to experience accurate sympathy or compassion. An empath is someone who perceives the emotions of others as his/her own.[1]
Definition[]
Empathy has many different definitions. These definitions encompass a broad range, from caring for other people and having a desire to help them, to experiencing emotions that match another person's emotions, to knowing what the other person is thinking or feeling, to blurring the line between self and other.
Since empathy involves understanding the emotional states of other people, the way it is characterized is derivative
of the way emotions themselves are characterized. If, for example, emotions are taken to be centrally characterized by bodily feelings, then grasping the bodily feelings of another will be central to empathy. On the other hand, if emotions are more centrally characterized by a combination of beliefs and desires, then grasping these beliefs and desires will be more essential to empathy. The ability to imagine oneself as another person is a sophisticated imaginative process. However, the basic capacity to recognize emotions is probably innate and may be achieved unconsciously. Yet it can be trained and achieved with various degrees of intensity or accuracy.
Empathy necessarily has a "more or less" quality. The paradigm case of an empathic interaction, however, involves a person communicating an accurate recognition of the significance of another person's ongoing intentional actions, associated emotional states, and personal characteristics in a manner that the recognized person can tolerate. Recognitions that are both accurate and
tolerable are central features of empathy.
The human capacity to recognize the bodily feelings of another is related to one's imitative capacities and seems to be grounded in an innate capacity to associate the bodily movements and facial expressions one sees in another with the proprioceptive feelings of producing those corresponding movements or expressions oneself. Humans seem to make the same immediate connection between the tone of voice and other vocal expressions and inner feeling.
Empathy is distinct from sympathy, pity, and emotional contagion. Sympathy or empathic concern is the feeling of compassion or concern for another, the wish to see them better off or happier. Pity is feeling that another is in trouble and in need of help as they cannot fix their problems themselves, often described as "feeling sorry" for
someone. Emotional contagion is when a person (especially an infant or a member of a mob) imitatively "catches" the emotions that others are showing without necessarily recognizing this is
happening.
Emotional and cognitive empathy[]
using his ability
Empathy can be divided into two major components:
- Emotional empathy, also called affective empathy: the drive to respond with an appropriate emotion to another's mental states. Our ability to empathize emotionally is supposed to be based on emotional contagion: being affected by another's emotional or arousal state.
- Cognitive empathy: the drive to identify another's mental states. The term cognitive empathy and theory of mind are often used synonymously.
Although science has not yet agreed upon a precise definition of these constructs, there is consensus about this distinction. There is a difference in disturbance of affective versus cognitive empathy in different psychiatric disorders. Psychopathy, schizophrenia, depersonalization and narcissism are characterized by impairments in emotional empathy but not in cognitive empathy, whereas autism spectrum disorder, bipolar disorder and borderline traits are associated with deficits in cognitive empathy but not in emotional empathy. Also in people without mental disorders, the balance between emotional and cognitive empathy varies. A meta-analysis of recent fMRI studies of
empathy confirmed that different brain areas are activated during affective–perceptual empathy and cognitive–evaluative empathy. Also a study with patients with different types of brain damage confirmed the distinction between emotional and cognitive empathy. Specifically, it appears to be responsible for emotional empathy, and the ventromedial prefrontal gyrus seems to mediate cognitive empathy.
Will Graham[]
Will Graham is unique in that he seems to have exceptionally high levels of both cognitive and emotional empathy, combined with an eidetic memory and imagination. These abilities help him understand the motives of some of the most depraved killers. Hannibal Lecter calls his ability “pure empathy”. Graham can assume the view point of virtually anyone he meets, even view points that sicken him. When evaluating a crime scene, he uses his imagination and empathy to almost become the killer, feeling what they were feeling during a murder. The only person he could not do this with was Lecter, as there were no obvious motivation during his killing spree. In the novel Red Dragon, Graham apprehends Lecter after recognizing the injuries of the sixth victim matched the medieval diagram Wound Man. Although he didn’t realise at the time, Graham caught a glimpse of the diagram in Lecter’s office and deduced he was the killer. In the film adaptation, Graham believed the killer was a cannibal thanks to someone at a gathering calling the flesh from the back of a chicken “oysters”. He got a flashback to the third victim, Darcy Taylor, who had flesh removed from her back. Graham realised that each victim lost an edible body part. His suspicions were confirmed by seeing a cook book in Lecter’s office with terms marked by him, implicating him in the murders. In both versions, Graham’s abilities are mistaken for psychic ability, due to his fact he can pick up on people’s emotions immediately and sensing their presence within a room. Dr Alan Bloom dismisses the psychic label, instead calling him an eidetekor.