Empathy is a term more and more commonly used, both by scientists and in everyday language. It in fact covers several distinct mental states that we will try to pinpoint. The word “empathy” is a translation from the German word Einfühlung, which refers to the ability to “feel the other from within”; it was used for the first time by the German psychologist Robert Vischer in 1873 to designate the mental projection of oneself onto an external object—a house, a gnarled old tree, or a windswept hill—with which one subjectively associates.1 Later, the philosopher Theodor Lipps extended this notion to describe the feeling of an artist who projects himself by his imagination not only into an inanimate object but also into the experience lived by another person. He offered the following example to illustrate the meaning of the word: We participate intensely in a tightrope walker walking on his wire. We cannot prevent ourselves from entering into his body and mentally we take each step with him.2 What’s more, we add feelings of anxiety and vertigo from which the tightrope walker is very fortunately exempt.
Empathy can be set off by an affective perception of feeling for the other, or by cognitive imagination of his experience. In both cases, the person clearly makes the distinction between his own feeling and the other’s, unlike emotional contagion in which this differentiation is blurred.
Affective empathy occurs when we enter into resonance with the situation and feelings of another person, with the emotions that are shown by the person’s facial expressions, gaze, tone of voice, body language, and behavior.
The cognitive dimension of empathy is born by mentally evoking an experience lived by another person, either by imagining what the other person is feeling or the way the experience affects the person, or by imagining what we would feel in the same situation.
Empathy can lead to an altruistic motivation, but it can also, when we find ourselves confronted with another person’s suffering, give rise to a feeling of distress and avoidance that leads us to close in on ourselves or turn away from the sufferings we’re witnessing.
The meanings attributed by various thinkers and scientists to the word “empathy,” as well as to other similar concepts like sympathy and compassion, are manifold and can hence easily lead to confusion. Still, scientific research conducted since the 1970s and 1980s, notably by the psychologists Daniel Batson, Jack Dovidio, and Nancy Eisenberg, as well as, more recently, by the neuroscientists Jean Decety and Tania Singer, allow us to discern the nuances of this concept more clearly and to examine its relation to altruism.
Affective empathy consists, then, of entering into resonance with others’ feelings, joy as well as suffering. Inevitably our own emotions and mental projections mingle with our representation of others’ feelings, sometimes without our being able to distinguish between the two.
According to the psychologist Paul Ekman, eminent specialist in emotions, this empathic awareness occurs in two stages: we begin by recognizing how someone else feels, then we enter into resonance with the other person’s feelings.3 As Darwin showed in his The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, evolution has equipped us with the ability to read others’ emotions from their facial expressions, their tone of voice, and their body language.4 This process is distorted, however, by our own emotions and biases, which act as filters. It took some time before Darwin spoke passionately in favor of abolishing slavery. To do this he had to be deeply troubled by the way the slaves he had met during his voyages on the Beagle were treated. According to theories current in his time, whites and blacks had different origins; blacks were supposed to occupy an intermediate level between man and animal, and they were treated accordingly. It was only after being confronted with the fate of slaves and having felt their sufferings deep within himself that Darwin became an ardent advocate for abolishing slavery.
Ekman distinguishes two types of affective resonance. The first is identical, or convergent resonance: I suffer when you suffer; I feel anger when I see you angry. If, for instance, your spouse comes home in a state because the boss was mean, you are indignant and you exclaim angrily, “How could he have treated you that way!”
In reactive or divergent resonance, instead of feeling the same emotion as your spouse and becoming angry, you distance yourself and, while still showing your concern, you say, “I’m so sorry you have to deal with such a jerk. What can I do for you? Would you like a cup of tea, or would you rather we go for a walk?” Your reaction goes along with your spouse’s emotions, but in a different emotional tone. Your calm, soothing concern allows you to help by defusing the feelings of anger and bitterness your spouse is feeling. In both cases, people appreciate the fact that you are concerned with their feelings.
On the other hand, if you don’t enter into resonance with your spouse’s feelings, you’ll say something like, “You had a tough time? Well, what about me! You’ll just have to get used to it,” which is not much comfort.
In everyday language, the word “sympathy” has preserved its etymological sense, stemming from the Greek sumpatheia, “natural affinity.” To feel sympathy for someone means you feel a certain affinity with that person, you feel in harmony with that person’s feelings, and you feel kindly toward that person.5 Sympathy opens us up to the other and breaks down the barriers that separate us from him or her. When we say to others, “You have all my sympathy,” that indicates that we understand the difficulties they are having and that we agree that their aspirations to free themselves are justified, or else that we show them our benevolent support.
But Darwin, and psychologists like Nancy Eisenberg,6 a pioneer in the study of altruism, define sympathy more precisely as altruistic concern or compassion for another person, a feeling that leads us to wish that others be happy or that their condition improve.
According to Nancy Eisenberg, we begin by feeling an emotional resonance generally associated with cognitive resonance, which makes us take into consideration the situation and viewpoint of the other. The memory of our own past experiences is added to these feelings to set off an interior mobilization. This entire process leads to a vicarious reaction to another’s fate. This reaction will depend notably on the intensity of our emotions and the way we control them. A reaction of aversion or avoidance can also occur.
Depending on the individual, these reactions will lead to sympathy and to altruistic prosocial behavior, or else to egocentric distress, which will be evinced either by a behavior of avoidance, or by a selfish prosocial reaction that leads us to come to others’ assistance mainly in order to calm our own anxiety.
The primatologist Frans de Waal regards sympathy as an active form of empathy: “Empathy is the process by which we gather information about someone else. Sympathy, in contrast, reflects concern about the other and a desire to improve the other’s situation.”7 Let’s try to pinpoint the relationships between empathy and altruism to see our way more clearly through all these definitions.
Entering into affective resonance with another can indeed help induce an altruistic attitude, but it is not at all necessary for me to feel what the other feels. Imagine I’m sitting on a plane next to a person terrified of air travel and obviously frozen in speechless unease. The weather is beautiful, the pilot is experienced, and even though I personally feel at ease, that does not prevent me from feeling and showing sincere concern for that person and trying to reassure him or her as best I can by a calm, warm presence. For my part, since I feel no anxiety, I am not disturbed by what the other feels, but I feel concern for the person and for what he or she is feeling. It is precisely this calm that allows me to soothe that person’s anxiety as much as possible and reassure him.
Similarly, if I know the person opposite me has a serious illness, even though the other person doesn’t yet know it or isn’t yet physically suffering from it, I can experience a powerful feeling of love and compassion. In this case, there is no question of feeling what the other feels, since the other is not yet suffering.
That said, imagining what the other is feeling by entering into affective resonance with him or her can certainly awaken in me a more intense compassion and a more active empathic concern, because I will have clearly become aware of the other’s needs through my personal experience. It is this ability to feel what the other is feeling that is lacking in those who feel indifferent about the fate of others, psychopaths in particular.
Picturing oneself in the other’s place, imagining what their hopes and fears are, and regarding the situation from their point of view are, when one takes the trouble to act this way, powerful ways to feel empathy. To be concerned by the fate of others it is essential to consider their situation attentively, to adopt their point of view, and to realize what you would feel if you were in the same situation. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau noted: “The rich man has little compassion for the poor man, since he can’t imagine himself poor.”
It is in fact important to give a face to the suffering of the other: the other person is not an abstract entity, an object, a remote individual fundamentally separate from me. We sometimes hear about tragic situations that remain disembodied for us. Then we see images, bodies, facial expressions, we hear people’s voices, and everything changes. More than verbal appeals from humanitarian organizations, the emaciated faces and skeletal bodies of children in Biafra, broadcast by organizations and media all over the world, did more to mobilize nations and urge them to remedy the tragic famine that raged between 1968 and 1970.8 When we see people obviously suffering, no question arises: we value them and feel concerned by their fate.
An American teacher tells how, during the first years of the AIDS epidemic, when the illness bore the mark of shame, most students in his class showed a negative attitude toward people stricken with this illness. Some went so far as to say that they “deserved to die.” Others preferred to turn away from them, saying, “I want nothing to do with them.” But after the teacher showed a documentary about AIDS that gave a face to the sufferings of dying people, most of his students were shaken, and some had tears in their eyes.9
Many soldiers have related how, when they found in their dead enemy’s pockets or kit his identity papers and family photos, they suddenly visualized this man’s life and understood he was like them. In his novel All Quiet on the Western Front, inspired by what he himself lived through, Erich Maria Remarque describes the feelings of a young German soldier who has just killed an enemy with his own hands and now talks to his body:
You were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?10
The American philosopher Charlie Dunbar Broad very correctly notes: “A large proportion of the cruelty which decent people applaud or tolerate is applauded or tolerated by them only because they are either too stupid to put themselves imaginatively into the position of the victims or because they deliberately refrain from doing so.”11
Is it necessary to reflect for a long time to picture the suffering of an adulterous woman mercilessly stoned, or the feelings of a man condemned to death, guilty or innocent, about to be executed, or the despair of a mother who sees her child dying? Do we have to wait for the other’s suffering to be imposed on us with such an intensity that we can no longer ignore it? Isn’t it this same blindness that leads to murder and war? Kafka wrote, “War is a monstrous lack of imagination.”
In my childhood, I lived for several years with one of my grandmothers who tended to spoil me, little boy that I was. When we were on vacation in Brittany, this sweet grandmother often spent her afternoons fishing on the quays of the harbor of Le Croisic, next to a group of old Breton ladies who wore the white lace headdress of the Bigoudens. It would never have occurred to me that all these charming ladies could take part in anything but an honorable activity. How could my grandmother have wished to harm anyone? The little wriggling fish she took out of the water looked like toys sparkling in the light. True, there was a difficult time when they suffocated in the wicker basket and their eyes became glassy, but I would quickly look away and preferred to watch the little cork that floated on the surface of the water, hoping it would go under again, sign of another catch. Obviously, I didn’t for an instant put myself in the fish’s place!
A few years later, when I was thirteen, a friend asked me point-blank: “What? You go fishing?” Her tone was both surprised and reproachful.
“You go fishing?” Suddenly, the scene appeared to me in all its reality: the fish pulled out of its vital element by a metal hook that pierced its mouth, “drowning” in air as we drown in water. To attract the fish to the hook, I had also pierced a living worm to make it into bait, thus sacrificing one life to sacrifice another more easily.
This sweet grandmother didn’t have a soft touch for everyone, then. Neither she nor I had till then taken the trouble to put ourselves in the other’s place. How could I have turned my thoughts for so long away from these sufferings? With a lump in my throat, I immediately gave up fishing, which was no more than a sinister pastime for me, and a few years later I became a vegetarian for the rest of my life.
I know that such concern for little fish may well seem excessive or laughable compared to the tragedies that devastate the lives of so many human beings all over the world, but it seems to me that it is important to understand that real compassion should not know any boundaries. If we lack compassion for certain sufferings and certain beings, we risk lacking compassion for all sufferings and all beings. We are more inclined to feel sympathy for people with whom we perceive the links they have in common with us, links that could be familial, ethnic, national, religious, or that simply reflect our affinities. Nevertheless, empathic concern should be extended to the point of becoming a resonance that is born from our shared humanity and from the fact that we share with all sentient beings the same aversion to suffering, even though they may experience suffering in ways that are different than ours.12
In everyday life, putting ourselves in the place of others and looking at things from their point of view is a necessity if we want to live in harmony with our fellows. Otherwise, we risk closing ourselves up in our mental fabrications which deform reality and give rise to useless torments. If I think the conductor on a subway train “is slamming the door in my face,” I am upset and demand, “why did he close it just for me? He could at least have let me through!” In that case, I’ve forgotten to adopt the conductor’s point of view, who sees nothing but a constant flow of anonymous passengers, and will inevitably have to close the doors in front of someone before starting the train moving.
The psychologist Daniel Batson has shown that the various meanings of the word “empathy” ultimately stem from two questions: “How can one know what another person is thinking and feeling?” and “What leads one person to respond with sensitivity and care to the suffering of another?”
Batson has enumerated eight different modalities of the term “empathy,” which are all linked yet do not constitute simply different aspects of the same phenomenon.13 After analyzing them, he came to the conclusion that only one of these forms, which he calls “empathic concern,” is both necessary and sufficient to engender an altruistic motivation.14
The first form, knowing another person’s internal state, can provide us with reasons for feeling concern for him or her, but is neither sufficient nor necessary to give rise to an altruistic motivation. One can in fact be aware of what someone is thinking or feeling, while still remaining indifferent to his or her fate.
The second form is motor and neural mimicry. Based on earlier works by Brothers, Damasio, and others, Preston and De Waal suggested a theoretical model for the neural mechanisms that underlie empathy and emotional contagion. According to these researchers, the fact of seeing someone in a given situation induces our neural system to adopt a similar state to the other’s, which leads to bodily and facial imitation accompanied by sensations similar to the other’s.15 This process of imitation by observation of physical behavior is also the basis for learning processes transmitted from one individual to another. According to the neuroscientist Tania Singer, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, however, this model does not clearly distinguish empathy, in which one unambiguously establishes the difference between self and other, from mere emotional contagion, in which we confuse our own emotions with the emotions of the other. According to Batson, this process can contribute to engendering feelings of empathy, but is not enough to explain them. In fact, we do not systematically imitate others’ actions: we react intensely when we watch a soccer player score a goal, but we do not necessarily feel inclined to imitate or emotionally resonate with someone who is organizing his papers or eating a dish we do not like.
The third form, emotional resonance, allows us to feel what the other is feeling, whether that feeling is joy, sadness, or any other emotion.16 It is impossible for us to live through exactly the same experience as someone else, but we can feel similar emotions. Nothing can get us into a good mood better than watching a group of friends overjoyed at seeing each other; on the other hand, the spectacle of people prey to intense distress moves us, even makes tears well up in our eyes. Feeling approximately the other’s experiences can give rise to an altruistic motivation, but here again, this kind of emotion is neither indispensable nor sufficient.17 In certain cases, the fact of feeling the other’s emotion risks inhibiting our altruistic response. If, faced with a terrified person, we too begin to feel fear, we could grow more concerned with our own anxiety than with the other’s fate.18 What’s more, to engender such a motivation, it is enough to become aware of the other’s suffering, without it being necessary to suffer oneself.
The fourth form consists of intuiting or projecting oneself into another’s situation. This is the experience to which Theodor Lipps was referring when he used the word Einfühlung. However, in order to be concerned with the other’s fate, it is not necessary to picture all the details of his experience: it is enough to know he is suffering. Moreover, one risks being mistaken when imagining what the other is feeling.
The fifth form is imagining how another is thinking and feeling as clearly as possible according to what he tells you, what you observe, and your knowledge of that person, his values, and his aspirations. Still, the simple fact of imagining the other’s interior state does not guarantee the emergence of an altruistic motivation.19 A calculating and ill-intentioned person can use knowledge of your interior state to manipulate you and harm you.
The sixth form consists in imagining how one would think and feel in the other’s place with one’s own nature, aspirations, and view of the world. If one of your friends is a great opera lover or rock fan and you can’t bear that kind of music, you can indeed imagine him feeling pleasure and you can be happy about that, but if you yourself were in the first row, you’d feel nothing but irritation. That’s why George Bernard Shaw wrote, “Do not do unto others as you would have them done unto you. They may have different tastes.”
The seventh form is the empathic distress one feels when one witnesses another’s suffering or when it is spoken of. This form of empathy runs more of a risk of resulting in avoidance behavior than in an altruistic attitude. In fact, it does not involve feeling distress for the other or putting oneself in place of the other, but a feeling of anxiety provoked by the other.20
Such a feeling of distress will not necessarily lead to a reaction of concern for the other or a response appropriate to the other’s suffering, especially if we can diminish our anxiety by turning our attention away from the suffering we see being experienced.
Some people can’t bear seeing upsetting images. They prefer to look away from these representations that make them feel bad, rather than confronting their reality. Choosing a physical or psychological way out is hardly useful to victims, and it would be better to become fully aware of the facts and to act with a view to remedying them.
Thus, when the French philosopher Myriam Revault d’Allonnes writes, “It’s in order not to suffer myself that I want the other not to suffer, and I am interested in the other out of love for myself… compassion is not an altruistic feeling,”21 she is describing empathic distress and not compassion in the sense we mean in this book, namely a state of mind that stems directly from altruistic love and is manifest when that love confronts suffering. True compassion is centered on the other and not on oneself.
When we are mainly concerned with ourselves, we become vulnerable to everything that can affect us. Trapped in this state of mind, egocentric contemplation of the suffering of others undermines our courage; it is felt as a burden that only increases our distress. In the case of compassion, on the other hand, altruistic contemplation of others’ suffering greatly increases our courage, our readiness, and our determination to remedy these torments.
If resonance with others’ suffering leads to personal distress, we should redirect our attention to the other and revive our capacity for kindness and altruistic love. To illustrate this, I would like to relate the following story, which a psychologist friend told me.
In Nepal one day a young woman, Sita, came to consult me because her sister had just killed herself by hanging. She was haunted by guilt at not having been able to prevent such an action, obsessed with images of her sister, whom she sought everywhere in crowds and for whom she waited at night. Unable to concentrate, she cried all day long and, when she ran out of tears, she was plunged into a prostration from which it was difficult to emerge. During one of our sessions, she looked me straight in the eyes; she was the embodiment of suffering. She said to me point-blank: “Do you know what it’s like to lose a sister like that? I’ll never get over it; ever since I was born, we shared the same bedroom, we did everything together. I wasn’t able to hold her back.”
I took her hand and, faced with the unbearable intensity of her suffering, I felt caught off-guard. I remembered the suicide of my sixteen-year-old first cousin and I had to make a huge effort to get control of myself so as not to break out crying too. I was overwhelmed by a conscious emotional resonance. And I knew that if I cried with Sita, I couldn’t help her. I waited for a bit, holding her hands in mine, I asked her to cry her fill and to breathe slowly. I did the same to calm my own emotions. I was aware of being filled with the onslaught of her despair. I managed to calm down, to look at her, Sita, to stop thinking about my own pounding heart, my eyes that were misting over with tears, and to erase the memories of my cousin.
Finally, when the emotional crisis had diminished and I felt that Sita was slowly emerging from the sway of traumatic images, I simply said to her, “I understand your sorrow; I really understand it. But, you know, you’re not alone.” I waited a while to see if she was listening to me, before continuing: “I too lost a cousin almost at the same age as you. I know how painful it is. But I understood and accepted the fact that I couldn’t do anything at that time. That it wasn’t my fault. And that one can get over this pain.” She suddenly raised her head to look me again straight in the eyes, to see if I was telling the truth, and also to check if it was really possible to get over such a shock. To my great surprise, she stood up and hugged me, murmuring, “I’ll try. Thank you.”
In the first part of the consultation, the therapist was clearly under the sway of empathic distress. For a few minutes, even though she felt compassion, she was powerless to help her patient, so much did she share and project her emotions. It was only when she got hold of herself by re-centering on the other and her pain that she was able to find words that could help her get over her suffering.
The eighth form, empathic concern, consists of becoming aware of the other’s needs and then feeling a sincere desire to come to his or her aid. According to Daniel Batson,22 only this empathic concern is a response directed toward the other—and not toward oneself—an answer that is both necessary and sufficient to result in an altruistic motivation. In fact, faced with people’s distress, the essential thing is to adopt the attitude that will bring them the greatest comfort, and to decide on the most appropriate action to remedy their sufferings.
Daniel Batson concludes that the first six forms of empathy can each contribute to engendering an altruistic motivation, but that none of them guarantees the emergence of such a motivation, no more than they constitute indispensable conditions. The seventh, empathic distress, goes clearly against altruism. Only the last, empathic concern, is both necessary and sufficient to make an altruistic motivation arise in our mind and urge us to action.
Pity is an egocentric, often condescending, feeling of commiseration, which in no way testifies to an altruistic motivation. One might give alms, for instance, full of a feeling of superiority. As an African proverb says, “The hand that gives is always higher than the hand that receives.” The Swiss philosopher Alexandre Jollien is more precise: “In pity, there is a humiliation for the one receiving. Altruism and compassion stem from equality, without humiliating the other.” Paraphrasing Spinoza, Alexandre adds, “In pity, sadness comes first. I am sad that the other is suffering, but I don’t really love him. In compassion, love comes first.”23
The novelist Stefan Zweig had also grasped the difference between the two when he wrote, “There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart’s impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another’s unhappiness…; and the other, the only kind that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.”24 That sentimental pity is like the empathic distress described above.
Slightly different nomenclature and analysis were proposed by the neuroscientist Tania Singer and the philosopher Frédérique de Vignemont. Basing their findings on studies of the brain, they distinguished three states: emotional contagion, empathy, and compassion.25 For them, these three affective states differ from a cognitive representation that consists of imagining the other’s thoughts and intentions and adopting the other’s subjective perspective, without, however, entering into affective resonance with the other.26
Singer and Vignemont define empathy as (1) an affective state (2) similar (isomorphic in scientific language) to the other’s affective state (3) produced by the observation or imagination of the other’s affective state which involves (4) an awareness that it is indeed the other who is the source of our own affective state.27 Such an approach to empathy is not basically different from the one proposed by Daniel Batson, but it helps us explore further the modes of this complex mental state.
An essential characteristic of empathy is entry into affective resonance with the other, while making a clear distinction between self and other: I know my feeling comes from the other, but I am not confusing my feeling with that of the other. It turns out that people who have difficulty clearly distinguishing their emotions from another’s can easily be submerged by emotional contagion and, because of this, do not reach empathy, which is the next stage.
The intensity, the clarity, and the quality—positive or negative—of the emotion expressed by the other, as well as the existence of affective ties with the person suffering, can have a great influence on the intensity of the empathic response of the observer.28 Resemblances and the degree of closeness between the protagonists, precise evaluation of the other’s needs,29 and the attitude of the person suffering toward the one who perceives the suffering (the fact, for example, that the person suffering is angry with the interlocutor) constitute just so many factors that will modulate the intensity of empathy.
The characteristics of the person who feels empathy will also have an influence. If, for example, I am not subject to vertigo, I will have trouble entering into empathic resonance with a person who is prey to that distress, but that will not prevent me from being aware of the fact that the other needs help or comfort.
Context will also be a factor. If I think, for instance, that someone’s joy is inappropriate, or even completely out of place (in the case of someone who is gloating over an act of revenge, for example), I will not enter into affective resonance with that person.30
In the case of emotional contagion, I automatically feel the other’s emotion without knowing that he or she is the one who provoked it, and without being really aware of what is happening to me. Depending on the case, the diameter of my pupils changes, my heart slows down or speeds up, or I look right and left anxiously, without being aware of these physical manifestations. As soon as I think, “I am anxious because he is anxious,” this is no longer emotional contagion but empathy, or conscious affective resonance.
Emotional contagion, distress, for example, exists in animals and young children. Thus, a baby starts crying when it hears another baby crying; but that does not necessarily mean they feel empathy, or that they are concerned with each other. We would have to know if they can make the distinction between themselves and others, which is not easy to determine, since we can’t ask them. Among young children, the first signs of distinction between self and other, as well as the first signs of empathy, appear between eighteen and twenty-four months.
Compassion is here defined by Tania Singer and her colleagues as the altruistic motivation to intervene in favor of someone who is suffering or is in need. It is thus a profound awareness of the other’s suffering, coupled with the desire to relieve it and do something for the other’s benefit. Compassion, then, implies a warm, sincere feeling of concern, but does not require that one feel the other’s suffering, as is the case for empathy.31
Olga Klimecki, who was then a researcher in Tania Singer’s laboratory, summarizes the researchers’ point of view this way: In the affective dimension, I feel something for you; in the cognitive dimension, I understand you; and in the motivational dimension, I want to help you.32
To illustrate these different mental states, let’s take the example of a woman whose husband is terrified by airplane travel and let’s consider the various reactions this woman can have toward him.
1. She is seated next to her husband. As he begins breathing more quickly, without her becoming really aware of it, her breathing accelerates and she becomes more agitated. This is emotional contagion. In fact, if someone asks her how she’s feeling, she could reply, “Fine,” or, at most: “I don’t know why, but I don’t feel very relaxed.” If you measure her heart rate, the dilation of her pupils, or other physiological parameters, you will observe the presence of signs of anxiety. Under the sway of emotional contagion, this woman is not aware of the other’s feelings and has only a confused perception of her own.
2. She realizes she is concerned and is moved by the fact that her husband is very anxious. She is now feeling empathy for him. She herself feels a certain unease; she feels her breathing and pulse accelerate. She is aware of feeling distress because her husband is prey to this emotion. There is no confusion between her and him. She is entering into affective resonance with him, but will not necessarily try to help him. These are the characteristics of empathy. This has not yet given rise to an altruistic motivation.
3. She is not anxious; she feels rather a warm sensation of care and a motivation to do something to relieve his torment. She thinks, “I’m fine, but my husband is upset. What can I do so he won’t be so affected? I’ll take his hand and try to calm and comfort him.” This, according to Tania Singer, is compassion.
4. When the perspective is purely cognitive, the affective component is absent. The woman is functioning only in a conceptual way. She says to herself, “I know my husband is afraid on planes. I have to take care of him and be attentive to him.” She feels neither anxiety nor warmth. She just has a mental schema that reminds her that people who have phobias on plane trips don’t feel well and deduces that that is her husband’s case, and she takes his hand, thinking it will help him.
The researches of Tania Singer and her team have shown that empathy, compassion, and cognitive awareness all rest on different neural bases and thus correspond to clearly distinct mental states.33
Neuroscientists think that empathy has two important advantages. First of all, compared to the cognitive approach, affective empathy probably offers a more direct and more precise path to predict another’s behavior. It has actually been observed that the fact of sharing similar emotions with someone else activates in us reactions that are better adapted to what the other feels and to the other’s needs.
Secondly, empathy allows us to acquire useful knowledge about our environment. If, for example, I see someone suffering from being burnt by touching a machine, the fact of entering into affective resonance with the victim gives me a feeling of aversion to that machine, without myself having to undergo the painful experience of being burned. Empathy is thus an effective tool to assess the world around me, through another’s experience. Finally, empathy is also a precious tool of communication with the other.34
We have seen that among the eight types of empathy listed by Daniel Batson, only empathic concern was necessary and sufficient to engender an altruistic motivation. What about the categories outlined by Tania Singer and her neuroscientist colleagues?
Emotional contagion can serve as a precursor to empathy but, in itself, it does not help to engender an altruistic motivation since it is accompanied by a confusion between self and other. It can even constitute an obstacle to altruism—if one is overwhelmed by this emotional contagion and disoriented, one is concerned only about oneself.
Empathy, or affective resonance, is also neutral a priori. According to the circumstance and the individual, it can transform into concern and give rise to the desire to provide for another’s needs. But empathy can also provoke a distress that focuses our attention on ourselves and diverts us from the other’s needs. For this last reason, empathy is not enough in itself to engender altruism.
The cognitive approach, on the other hand, can constitute a step toward altruism but, like empathy, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for the genesis of an altruistic motivation. It may even engender completely selfish behavior, as in the case of psychopaths who feel neither empathy nor compassion, but are expert in guessing others’ thoughts and use this ability in order to manipulate them.
There remains compassion whose essence is an altruistic motivation, necessary and sufficient so that we will desire the good of the other and will give rise to the wish to accomplish it by taking action. Compassion is awareness of the other’s situation, and is accompanied by the wish to relieve suffering and to procure the other’s happiness. Finally, it is not distorted by confusion between the emotions felt by the other and our own.
Thus the importance of compassion for all suffering beings is emphasized by psychologists, who speak of empathic concern, by neuroscientists, and by Buddhism, where it occupies a central place.