In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week, we’ll look at cognitive vs. emotional (affective) empathy.
Emotional empathy, known formally as affective empathy, refers to our ability to share the emotions of others. Cognitive empathy refers to our ability to infer and understand someone’s emotional experiences from their perspective, while distinguishing others’ feelings from our own. So, if you feel anxious, and recognizing your anxiety makes me feel anxious, that’s emotional empathy. If I try to take your perspective and understand what that’s like for you, why you might be feeling anxious, and how that might affect your behaviour, that’s cognitive empathy.
Different parts of the brain appear to be the key regions involved in emotional and cognitive empathy, specifically the inferior frontal gyrus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, respectively. Mirror neurons, which fire the same way when observing someone perform a behaviour as they do when we do the behaviour ourselves, appear to play a role in emotional empathy. We may pick up on others’ emotional expressions and then have a similar inner experience as if we were to exhibit those emotional expressions.
Twin studies have shown that there’s a heritable component to cognitive empathy. Personality may also play a role, with high levels of openness (one of the factors in the five-factor model of personality) being associated with greater cognitive empathy.
Emotional empathy is present early in life, and infants often mirror their caregivers’ emotions. Cognitive empathy emerges at around age 3 or 4, which is when children start to develop a theory of mind.
Theory of mind
Cognitive empathy requires theory of mind, i.e. the ability to infer others’ mental states, including thoughts and emotions. It’s when this develops that children can begin to develop cognitive empathy. A similar concept is mentalization, which is the ability to imagine the feelings, beliefs, goals, and intentions that underlie the behaviours we observe in others.
Mental flexibility is required to be able to shift away from our usual egocentric perspective to try to adopt someone else’s point of view.
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) identifies mind-reading as a cognitive distortion, and I think the difference between that and theory of mind/cognitive empathy has to do with the level of certainty and the rationality and emotional charge associated with the conclusions we’re arriving at. If someone doesn’t return a text message right away, I might use cognitive empathy to generate possible reasons from their perspective (like being busy at work), or I might use mind-reading to arrive at a conclusion that the person must be mad at me (an emotionally charged conclusion that I feel very certain about with no basis for that certainty).
Related concepts
The term emotional contagion refers to experiencing similar emotions when with a group of people feeling a certain way. This doesn’t necessarily involve affective empathy. If I’m around a group of people who are happy and I start feeling happy, and that happiness feels like my own emotion, that’s emotional contagion. If I feel like I’m vicariously experiencing other group members’ happiness, that’s where affective empathy comes in.
Sympathy, which is sometimes referred to as empathic concern, involves feeling sorrow or concern that someone else is in distress. If I’m sympathetic towards someone, I may have very little understanding of what that distress feels like for them, but I feel bad for them because I know they’re struggling.
Another type of reaction to the emotions of others is referred to as personal distress. This is an egocentric emotional response to someone else’s emotions. Let’s say you’re feeling sad, and I realize that your sadness indirectly relates to something I did. If I feel guilty as a result, that guilt would be a form of personal distress response.
Conditions that affect empathy
Some conditions, like autism and schizophrenia, can cause difficulties with theory of mind. People with these conditions tend to have a harder time with cognitive empathy, and in schizophrenia, this tends to worsen with greater chronicity of illness.
Research results are mixed as to whether or how schizophrenia affects emotional empathy. Affective empathy generally remains intact in people on the autism spectrum (and I’ve come across some autistic people describing very high levels of emotional empathy). Antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy involve deficits in emotional empathy.
Borderline personality disorder is associated with high levels of emotional empathy (particularly in response to negative emotions) but impairments in cognitive empathy. This is consistent with difficulties with mentalization, something that mentalization-based therapy aims to address.
Implications
People who have greater cognitive empathy tend to be better at regulating their own emotions. High affective empathy, on the other hand, may negatively affect emotion regulation. This certainly seems to be consistent with the patterns in borderline personality disorder.
I remember the book I Hate You—Don’t Leave Me talked about people with BPD lacking true empathy, and autism is sometimes associated with a lack of empathy, but I think both of those accusations greatly oversimplify. “True empathy” isn’t a clearly defined term, although based on Google, it seems like it’s mostly used to refer to emotional empathy. People who describe themselves as empaths seem to have high levels of emotional empathy, and it seems like the popular understanding of empathy is most consistent with the emotional type. So to say that people with BPD or autism lack empathy simply isn’t accurate if most people are conceiving of empathy in the affective sense.
I think my own cognitive empathy ability is quite a bit stronger than my affective empathy ability. That worked well for me when I worked as a mental health nurse, as I was able to pick up what was going on with my patients without absorbing their emotions, so I generally didn’t find my interactions with patients to be emotionally tiring.
Does the distinction between emotional and cognitive empathy make sense to you? Do you tend to find one easier than the other?
References
- Canty, A. L., Cao, Y., Neumann, D., & Shum, D. H. (2021). The functional significance of cognitive empathy and theory of mind in early and chronic schizophrenia. Psychiatry Research, 299, 113852.
- Flasbeck, V., Enzi, B., & Brüne, M. (2019). Enhanced processing of painful emotions in patients with borderline personality disorder: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 10, 357.
- Shamay-Tsoory, S. G., Aharon-Peretz, J., & Perry, D. (2009). Two systems for empathy: A double dissociation between emotional and cognitive empathy in inferior frontal gyrus versus ventromedial prefrontal lesions. Brain, 132(3), 617-627.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Empathy
- Thompson, N.M., van Reekum, C.M. & Chakrabarti, B. (2022). Cognitive and affective empathy relate differentially to emotion regulation. Affective Science, 3, 118-134.
- Warrier, V., Grasby, K. L., Uzefovsky, F., Toro, R., Smith, P., Chakrabarti, B., … & Baron-Cohen, S. (2018). Genome-wide meta-analysis of cognitive empathy: Heritability, and correlates with sex, neuropsychiatric conditions and cognition. Molecular Psychiatry, 23(6), 1402-1409.
The Psychology Corner has an overview of terms covered in the What Is… series, along with a collection of scientifically validated psychological tests.
Ashley L. Peterson
BScPharm BSN MPN
Ashley is a former mental health nurse and pharmacist and the author of four books.
Interesting concepts. I’m so tired of people calling themselves “empaths” when they clearly can’t pick up other emotions and are focused only on their own. Idk why this has become such a thing. Anyway, I think I’m average in this department, though I get anxious when people argue and snipe because it reminds me of my parents. Sometimes I can empathize with others and want to help; sometimes I just wanna get away from them…
Yeah, I’m not sure how/why the whole empath thing got so popular. It also seems weird to me when people are absolutely certain they know exactly what someone else is feeling, when the only thing they can be certain of is how they’re feeling in response to whatever the other person is putting out.
Exactly!!!
I find words like “true,” annoying. And, of course, we’d pick the one that’s mostly shown on television shows.
Everyone’s an empath, and everyone is swimming in empathy. You’d think the world would be a better place.
I’m a mix of the two. My default is emotional empathy and I find it uncomfortable. I find cognitive empathy to be more useful in the long run.
Perhaps “true” is a codeword for “I am a true asshole”…
😂
I think that, like a lot of people on the spectrum, I have stronger emotional empathy, weaker cognitive empathy. I suspect I may have learnt to have more cognitive empathy by reading a lot (if you accept the theory that reading fiction builds empathy), but it’s not intuitive to me.
I hadn’t heard of that connection between cognitive empathy and reading fiction, but that makes sense.
Oh that’s so interesting to connect reading fiction to cognitive empathy! 🤔
It is!
Thank you so much for tying in BPD in this explanation. That really helps clear up a lot of the difficulties I had with my ex. I used to blame myself for poor communication, but now understanding that any perceived negative emotion was going to set them off helps me heal and stop blaming myself.
I’m glad it helps. 😊
I do think I’m quite good at being sympathetic to the emotional state of others and it’s almost a form of a self defense mechanism that I have developed. The better I can make a person that is sad or distressed feel, then the safer and more comfortable I feel too.
That makes sense.
Yeah, the self-proclaimed empaths – why do they annoy us so (self-righteous little twats). They feel all the feels, don’tcha know. I would like to think I am big on cognitive empathy but before coming back to comment I researched something I was going to ask you – Seems my tendency (ok, it’s more than a tendency you can bank on it) to cry/laugh when I see other people doing that is down to mirror neurons. Without thinking about it I will also mimic someone’s speech patterns or mannerisms when interacting with them. Uh oh! How crazy am I?
I do the speech mimicking thing too, and to a lesser extent mannerism mimicking. Or at least I used to when I wasn’t a hermit.
I have empathy when l need to otherwise l really tend to not care one way or the other. Many people used to say “Well Rory’s autistic, so naturally he struggles with empathy for others …” which was bollocks.
I used to say this and still do – l give a damn about those that give a damn about themselves first and foremost and then give a damn about others.
Basically, all this quack quack nonsense of ooh l am an emapth, aaah you are an empath drives me insane. Some people care about others more than they care about themselves when they should care about themselves first in order to be able to care about others.
Very good points.
We get overwhelmed at other’s distress. We used to get rageful because we thought everything in the world was our fault and we wanted to fix it.
We still get a surge of panic and overwhelm at other’s distress. Our aspiration is to ride out our freak out to stay with the person, to be a companion and listen, validate but not fix unless asked. This can sometimes occur via text. In person we struggle to not fall to pieces at any signs of distress. We dissociate to protect us.
We SUCK at guessing other’s true emotions. We catastrophize almost everything that happens to anyone including us. We look for the worst case and prepare for it or live it in a delusion
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You are a treasure to us
Love you ❤️❤️❤️
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I did a quiz once and I only have emotional empathy. I don’t have the empathy in which I can “put myself in other peoples shoes”
Empathy is a feeling of understanding and caring for the feelings of others. It is the ability to spontaneously experience the feelings of another person, and to share in their emotions. Empathy is key to effective communication and relationships. It can also help us to identify and respond to the needs of others.
Empathy can be developed through experience and education. It is often associated with feelings of compassion, understanding, and warmth. People with high levels of empathy are often considered to be compassionate and caring. They are also good at identifying the needs of others and are often excellent problem-solvers.
This is a very well written article! Thank you
Understanding the difference between cognitive and emotional empathy is essential for building strong and meaningful relationships with others. Cognitive empathy allows us to understand and recognize someone else’s perspective, while emotional empathy allows us to feel and connect with their emotions. Thanks for posting this article; it’s really helpful. However, if you are looking forward to boosting your emotional well-being, then check out this article on easy habits to boost emotional well-being It has some amazing points that were really helpful to me.