A person who can imagine the experience of someone elses emotions has what ability?

As noted above, negative feelings play important roles in impulse control, empathy, and conscience.

Lower levels of empathy may contribute to conflict in social interactions and thereby heighten levels of negative emotions experienced by some children.

The developmental literature points to at least 6 levels of empathy emerging in succession, each expanding and adding to the repertoire of empathic potential.

The major focus of the 24- and 36-month visits is on parenting and toddler self-regulation (behavior problems, empathy, compliance, and internalization of parental rules).

Examples include empathy, flexibility, sensitivity and courage, precise qualities varying according to the individual.

Developing representations of possibilities for prosocial actions are also important in developing outcomes for empathy and guilt.

Moreover, peer play forces children to reason about others' feelings, possibly serving as a unique mechanism for empathy development.

In the present study we assess the third component, empathy, by children's self-repor ts of affective response to social stimuli.

Perspective-taking can also initiate a preverbal process (one hears about a familiar victim's misfortune and imagines his facial expression, which triggers empathy).

Many respondents showed tremendous empathy for ex-combatants and emphasised that they would not normally commit atrocities.

And while she addresses them with empathy, she cannot give them voice, for they have never learned to speak for themselves.

It may be that the addition of sympathy, in the primitive sense of emotional contagion, to perspective taking is sufficient to constitute empathy.

It confers on the various perspectives on empathy only a specious nominal unity.

Goals for future research include determining the ways in which empathy is emotion-specific and dependent on overt or covert perception.

In a cosmopolitan society suitable objects of empathy are available ad lib.

These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

This article is part of our series on Empathy- based Research.
You can view the full series or download the report.

At Brand Genetics, we use empathy as a qualitative research technique to help our clients understand their consumers. Applied empathy helps us reframe a challenge from a consumer perspective, and in doing so reveal new opportunities. But what exactly is empathy?

Beyond metaphor

The metaphors of ‘standing in someone else’s shoes’ and ‘seeing through someone else’s eyes’ are often used to describe empathy. These metaphors are evocative, but empathy is also a specific mental ability, like intelligence. In essence, empathy is the ability to feel and understand what someone else is feeling.

Empathy is emotional insight

Empathy is a mental ability that produces emotional insight, allowing us to feel and understand the emotional world of someone else.

The term empathy is actually a translation of the German word “Einfühlung”, which quite literally means emotional insight (in-feeling). German philosopher Theodor Lipps coined this term “Einfühlung” in 1903 to denote our mental ability to project ourselves into the body of someone else and feel what they are feeling.

For example, when we observe the adrenalin-pumping performances of an acrobat, we project ourselves into them, and “we feel ourselves inside the acrobat”. The German “Einfühlung” was translated into “empathy” the following decade by British psychologists James Ward and Edward Titchener. Today, the Cambridge English Dictionary defines empathy in a way that is consistent with this original understanding as “the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation.”

List of Empathy Definitions

Just as you have an IQ (intelligence quotient), you have an EQ (empathy quotient) which measures your capacity for emotional insight – the ability to feel and understand what someone else is feeling.

For over a century, scientists have been researching empathy, both as a partially genetically inherited personality trait and as a learned skill. Over this time, they have adopted a number of definitions of empathy to delineate empathy from related terms such as sympathy, emotional intelligence and compassion.

Here’s a useful list of definitions that capture the essence of empathy.

  1. “Empathy is our capacity to grasp and understand the mental and emotional lives of others” Susan Lanzoni (2018)
  2. “Empathy is about understanding. Empathy lets us see the world from other points of view and helps us form insights that can lead us to new and better ways of thinking, being, and doing” Micheal Ventura (2018)
  3. “A capacity for ‘positional thinking,’ the ability to see the world from another creature’s viewpoint” Martha Nussbaum, (2016)
  4. “Empathy has two components: “cognitive empathy”, the ability to recognize or infer what another person is feeling, including whether they are suffering; and “affective empathy”, our emotional response to their thoughts and feelings, which impels us to action (e.g., to reduce their suffering)” Simon Baron Cohen (2016)
  5. “Empathising is about spontaneously and naturally tuning into the other person’s thoughts and feelings, whatever these might be.” Simon Baron Cohen (2004)
  6. “The capacity to (a) be affected by and share the emotional state of another, (b) assess the reasons for the other’s state, and (c) identify with the other, adopting his or her perspective” Frans De Waal (2008) 
  7. “The capacity to understand and enter into another person’s feelings and emotions or to experience something from the other person’s point of view” Andrew Colman (2015)
  8. “Empathy has been used to refer to two related human abilities: mental perspective taking (cognitive empathy, CE) and the vicarious sharing of emotion (emotional empathy, EE)”. Adam Smith (2006)
  9. “Empathy is the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that understanding to guide your actions” Roman Krznarik (2014)
  10. “Vicariously catching someone’s feelings—known as “emotional empathy”—and thinking about what they feel—”cognitive empathy” Jamil Zaki (2019)
  11. “Empathy – the ability to understand and share in the internal states of others – is a complex, multidimensional phenomenon that includes a number of functional processes, including emotion recognition, emotional contagion, and emotion priming” Leonardo Christov-Moore (2014)
  12. “Empathy is about acquiring feelings. The goal is to feel what it’s like to be another person” Jon Kolko (2014)
  13. “Empathy is an emotional response (affective), dependent upon the interaction between trait capacities and state influences. Empathic processes are automatically elicited but are also shaped by top-down control processes. The resulting emotion is similar to one’s perception (directly experienced or imagined) and understanding (cognitive empathy) of the stimulus emotion, with recognition that the source of the emotion is not one’s own” Benjamin Cuff (2014)
  14. “For us, it’s the ability to see an experience through another person’s eyes, to recognize why people do what they do. It’s when you go into the field and watch people interact with products and services in real time—what we sometimes refer to as ‘design research’.” David Kelley (2013)
  15. “Feeling a congruent emotion with another person, in virtue of perceiving her emotion with some mental process such as imitation, simulation, projection or imagination” Julinna Oxley (2011)
  16. “Empathy can be understood as a sense of knowing the personal experience of another person” Lisbeth Goubert (2009)
  17. “The tendency to vicariously experience other individuals’ emotional states” Paolo Albiero (2008)
  18. “The understanding and sharing in another’s emotional state or context” Douglas Cohen (1996)
  19. “Cognitive empathy will be understood as the ability to construct a working model of the emotional states of others, and affective empathy will be understood as the ability to be sensitive to and vicariously experience the feelings of others” Renate Reniers (2011)
  20. “A shared emotional experience occurring when one person (the subject) comes to feel a similar emotion to another (the object) as a result of perceiving the other’s state” Stephanie Preston (2006)
  21. “Empathic understanding is placing oneself imaginatively in another’s experiential world while feeling into her or his experiences with the aim of comprehending these experiences” Hans Alma (2006)
  22. “Empathy is a complex form of psychological inference that enables us to understand the personal experience of another person through cognitive/evaluative and affective processes” Nicolas Danziger (2006)
  23. “Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s position and to intuit what that person is feeling” Daniel Pink (2005)
  24. “Empathy denotes, at a phenomenological level of description, a sense of similarity between the feelings one experiences and those expressed by others” Jean Decety (2004)
  25. “The ability to understand and share in another’s emotional state or context” Douglas Cohen (1996)
  26. “Sharing another’s feelings by placing oneself psychologically in that person’s circumstance” Richard Lazarus (1994)
  27. “Empathy is a process for understanding an individual’s subjective experiences by vicariously sharing that experience while maintaining an observant stance” William Zinn (1993)
  28. “The capacity to know emotionally what another is experiencing from within the frame of reference of that other person, the capacity to sample the feelings of another or to put oneself in another’s shoes” David Berger (1987)
  29. “The process by which one person is able to imaginatively place himself in another’s role and situation in order to understand the other’s feelings, point of view, attitudes, and tendencies to act in a given situation” Raymond Gordon (1987)
  30. “The state of empathy, or being empathic, is to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person, but without ever losing the “as if” condition” Carl Rogers (1980)
  31. “The psychological state of imaginatively projecting oneself into another’s situation” Theodor Lipps (1903)

What is it called when you can sense someone's emotions?

An empath or highly sensitive person (HSP) is someone who experiences the emotions of others. Empaths have the unique ability to sense and absorb others' emotions, which typically makes them extremely caring, compassionate, and understanding people. Empaths have the ability to easily see another person's perspective.

What is the ability to share emotions?

Empathy is the ability to recognize emotions and to share perspectives with other people.

What is it called when you put other people's feelings before yours?

Empathy involves not just feelings but thoughts, and it encompasses two people—the person we are feeling for and our own self. To put ourselves in someone else's shoes, we must strike a balance between emotion and thought and between self and other.

What are the 3 types of empath?

What Are the 3 Main Types of Empaths?.
Physical Empath. You are especially attuned to other people's physical symptoms and tend to absorb them into your body. ... .
Emotional Empath. You mainly pick up other people's emotions and can become a sponge for their feelings, both happy and sad. ... .
Intuitive Empath..