Empathy

Empathy is generally described as the ability to perceive another person's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience. However, there are other (sometimes conflicting) definitions of empathy that include but are not limited to social, cognitive, and emotional processes primarily concerned with understanding others. Empathy is often considered to be a broad term, and can be divided into more specific concepts and categories, such as cognitive empathy, emotional (or affective) empathy, somatic empathy, and spiritual empathy. Major areas of research include the development of empathy, the genetics and neuroscience of empathy, cross-species empathy, and the impairment of empathy. Some researchers have attempted to quantify empathy through different methods, such as questionnaires that participants can fill out and then be scored on their answers. The ability to imagine oneself as another person is a sophisticated process. However, the basic capacity to recognize emotions in others may be innate and may be achieved unconsciously. Empathy exists on a spectrum, an individual can be more or less empathetic toward another individual and empirical research supports a variety of interventions that are able to improve empathy.