Understanding the minds of others; protecting the minds of others
Empathy is often confused with sympathy. While sympathy is felling sense of support for someone or something, empathy is understanding how someone else feels or showing this.
During the COVID era and through various racial movements worldwide many showed sympathy – donating to charity to help others, wearing masks to protect others, and physically distancing themselves from others to help others. At the same time, being apart from others for a long time is a risk for developing mental health difficulties. Loneliness can be a strong factor; people in many different situations are at risk. Empathy is a way one can help people avoid mental health difficulties during this time that come from many situations including isolation or discrimination.
Compassion and tenderness have been equated with empathy. In “Empathy: A Review of the Concept” published in Emotion Review (EMR) in 2014 empathy being a cognitive or affective concept is suggested as the most discussed part of empathy. Cognitive empathy is defined as understanding another’s feelings, related to the mind. Affective empathy is the ability to experience the emotion oneself.
There has been research into these concepts and it has been found that there is personality and development influences the two. Those on the Autism Spectrum have appeared as having a deficit of cognitive empathy while having average levels of affective empathy.
There are other debates whether empathy is simply emotional or a combinational of emotional and cognition, the brain thinking about who, what, where, when, why, and how.
Empathy is also seen in literature. Characters, scenes, and settings can invoke emotions that make the reader or watcher more closely understand something. A scene from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone depicts Neville Longbottom standing his ground to prevent Harry Potter, Ronald Weasley, and Hermione Granger from sneaking out. Although he does end up stunned, Hermione does say “I’m really sorry, sorry about this”; it shows cognitive empathy – knowing how another feels, articulated through oral expression.
Affective empathy can clearly be seen in compassion. Within different groups relating to mental health such as addiction and depression, there is commonly one who has overcome. This person clearly shows affective empathy, someone who knows the experience and emotions carried with a mental illness and recovery. When the time is appropriate the recovered displays empathy, commonly by saying something about being in the same position and how it was overcome.
Empathy may also be triggered by real people (same room or reality TV), or an absent person (someone that passed away or moved away).
Depending on the type of empathy, there may a strong distinction of the self and other – observer and observed. Neuroscience has also found that experiences of empathy come with feelings that are evoked; seeing someone clearly with painful legs can invoke feelings of pain in the observer, lighting up the part of the brain that interprets the signals for experiencing pain. The same can happen in happiness, happiness empathy; seeing someone overflowing with happiness can make the observer happy.
With the growing use of devices to communicate and social distancing, in-person empathy can be extremely difficult to find. Not giving up is a sign of resilience and finding empathy that empowers this resilience can help one overcome unforeseen challenges.
