Empathy and Perspective Taking

Abstract

Empathy concerns a response of one individual to the emotional experiences of another. Currently, most scholars agree that cognitive as well as affective processes are involved in empathic responses. That is, observing someone who is experiencing an emotion may evoke a congruent emotion in the observer, and may also evoke perspective-taking processes, which individuals use to imagine others’ situations. The former is mainly an affective response, referred to here with the term empathy, whereas the latter is a cognitive response, referred to here with the term perspective taking. Empathy can result in sympathy or personal distress. Sympathy (also labeled empathic concern) is defined as a vicarious emotional reaction based on the apprehension of another’s internal state, and involves feelings of concern for others. Personal distress (also labeled empathic distress) is an aversive affective reaction, such as discomfort or anxiety, resulting from empathic overarousal induced by viewing another’s negative emotion. Since personal distress is a self-focused reaction, it may hinder sympathy and perspective taking (Eisenberg, Shea, Carlo, & Knight, 1991). This entry uses the term empathy to refer to both empathy and sympathy, as these terms are used interchangably in the literature. Empathy and perspective taking are thought to facilitate each other, and have indeed been found to be related in adolescence, concurrently as well as longitudinally. Both empathy and perspective taking are deemed to play important roles in adolescents’ social and moral development, although their specific effects may be different. Further, empathy and perspective taking can be construed in terms of both a relatively stable dispositional characteristic (i.e., trait empathy) and a response as it occurs in specific situations (i.e., state empathy). In line with the notion that individual differences in trait empathy and perspective taking influence the likelihood of engaging in empathy-related processes in particular situations, a study among adolescents indeed revealed that trait empathy and perspective taking predicted state empathy and perspective taking (Van der Graaff et al., 2016).