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:
“Friends broaden our horizons. They serve as new models with whom we can identify. They allow us to be ourselves—and accept us that way. They enhance our self-esteem because they think we’re okay, because we matter to them. And because they matter to us—for various reasons, at various levels of intensity—they enrich the quality of our emotional life.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)
“Creativity becomes more visible when adults try to be more attentive to the cognitive processes of children than to the results they achieve in various fields of doing and understanding.”
—Loris Malaguzzi (20th century)
“The attempt to be an ideal parent, that is, to behave correctly toward the child, to raise her correctly, not to give to little or too much, is in essence an attempt to be the ideal child—well behaved and dutiful—of one’s own parents. But as a result of these efforts the needs of the child go unnoticed. I cannot listen to my child with empathy if I am inwardly preoccupied with being a good mother; I cannot be open to what she is telling me.”
—Alice Miller (20th century)