Emotional and Cognitive Empathy
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, 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, the inferior frontal gyrus appears to be responsible for emotional empathy, and the ventromedial prefrontal gyrus seems to mediate cognitive empathy.
Emotional empathy can be subdivided into:
- Personal distress: the inclination to experience self-centered feelings of discomfort and anxiety in response to another’s suffering.
- Empathic concern: the inclination to experience of sympathy and compassion towards others in response to their suffering.
There is no consensus regarding the question if personal distress is a basic form of empathy or if it falls outside of empathy. There is a developmental aspect to this subdivision. Infants respond to the distress of others by getting distressed themselves; only when they are 2 years old they start to respond in other-oriented ways, trying to help, comfort and share.
Read more about this topic: Empathetic
Famous quotes containing the words emotional, cognitive and/or empathy:
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