Empathy is about experiencing another person’s emotional perspective, like “walking in someone else’s shoes”. Compassion involves empathy and acts of kindness. For instance, we may feel sorry for someone who has dropped their shopping and offer to help.
Understanding others’ feelings dates back to our early ancestors when emotions such as empathy evolved to support social bonding and collaboration. Interestingly, scientists have also found empathy in other animals, including great apes, dolphins, elephants, dogs, and even rodents. The recent neurobiological discovery of mirror neurons explains how we perceive others’ emotions in our own bodies. Like a radio receiver, we are all vulnerable to picking up the expressed emotions of people around us. This even works remotely; watching someone taking part in a stressful event on television can cause anxiety and produce symptoms of stress, including rising levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Emotions can also be unconsciously shared over social media. In one experiment, researchers found that when timeline stories were made more negative than usual, user posts tended to be more negative.
We can experience emotional empathy, where we feel the same as another person, and cognitive empathy, where we understand in a more detached way; this is the definition of sympathy. For example, sympathy cards often have the message, “Thinking of you”.
Of course, empathy can be positive when you feel others’ positive emotions. For instance, when someone full of energy and happiness enters a room. Clearly understanding and empathising with how other people feel is important, but if this means taking on other people’s feelings that do not serve us, then what is the point? If you try to help someone who is full of anxiety, but feel anxious yourself, are you really helping or hindering the situation?
Although empathy and compassion are often used interchangeably, the differences can be clarified as:
- Empathy is feeling with the other person, tends to be reactive and passive, and feelings are less regulated.
- Compassion is feeling for the other person, tends to be responsive and active, and feelings are more regulated.
An experiment that proved these differences involved scanning the brains of experienced monks who had developed compassion. Although it may sound unusual, the monks were asked to practise a compassion meditation known as loving-kindness while they heard the sounds of people suffering. Non-meditators, who served as controls in the same experiment, showed activity associated with empathy and feelings of sadness and pain. Interestingly, the brain scans from the monks showed that activity in regions linked to empathy was suppressed, whereas regions involved in care and positive social attachment were active. When researchers taught the loving-kindness practice to people in the control group, they found that people responded in the same way as the monks. When followed up, these people also reported feeling less stressed at work and experiencing greater well-being.
Empathy is an automatic response that is often unacknowledged. Compassion is more about being calm and aware enough to avoid taking on unnecessary emotional distress from others, so we’re better resourced to provide help and support when it’s needed.
Suggested weekly practice
- Notice when you take on other people’s feelings – feeling with rather than feeling for
- Explore the difference between empathy and compassion during the week
- Try using the loving-kindness practice as a meditation, but also when you are out and about. For instance, sending loving-kindness to strangers on public transport.
Guided practice
- Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
- Play the first mindful mantra practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
- Then close your eyes while this meditation plays to experience using the loving-kindness practice.