What empathy is: understanding, feeling with, and caring without burning out

“Good at empathy” can mean several things. The Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), widely used in empathy research, measures four parts: perspective taking, imagining yourself in someone’s position; fantasy, getting absorbed in characters in stories; empathic concern, feeling for people in difficulty; and personal distress, becoming anxious and upset yourself in the face of someone else’s suffering (Davis, 1983). Perspective taking is often grouped as cognitive empathy, and empathic concern and personal distress as affective, or emotional, empathy.

These four parts behaved differently. In the same study of about 1,300 university students, people higher in perspective taking tended to get along better with others and to have higher self-esteem, while people higher in personal distress tended to have lower self-esteem and more interpersonal difficulties (Davis, 1983). Being deeply shaken by someone’s pain and understanding them well are not the same thing.

mind.io’s empathy & emotion style test takes one of these, how much you feel for people in difficulty, adds something the IRI does not measure, how much you share in others’ joy, and calls the two together “empathy warmth”; it separately measures how much weight feelings carry in your decisions and how often you check in with your own emotions. This guide takes the kinds of empathy one at a time and gathers research-based ways to grow and protect each. The emotional intelligence guide covers emotional intelligence (EQ), often mentioned alongside empathy, and how accurate EQ tests are.

“Put yourself in their shoes” is common advice, but whether it actually helps you know what someone feels is another question. In a study of 25 experiments, being told to take the other person’s perspective did not consistently improve accuracy at reading emotions from faces, spotting lies or predicting a spouse’s preferences. If anything, accuracy dropped slightly overall, while confidence sometimes rose (Eyal, Steffel and Epley, 2018).

In the study’s final experiment, what did improve accuracy was getting the other person’s perspective directly through conversation (Eyal, Steffel and Epley, 2018). So asking and checking, with “how are you feeling right now?” or “here is what I understood, is that right?”, tends to prevent more misunderstandings than “if I were you, I would feel this.”

This does not make perspective taking useless. In the same study it reduced the habit of judging from your own point of view. The point is that knowing someone’s mind takes new information rather than imagination. Holding off on judgment and listening so the other person can say it themselves can be a good place for empathy to start.

Empathy usually brings to mind getting through hard times together, but how you respond when someone shares good news also moves a relationship. In two of the four studies in one paper, telling others about a good event was linked with more positive mood and well-being that day, and more so when people felt the listener responded actively and constructively (Gable, Reis, Impett and Asher, 2004).

In relationships where a partner usually responded with enthusiasm, the quality of the relationship, such as intimacy and daily marital satisfaction, was higher as well (Gable, Reis, Impett and Asher, 2004). Responses that belittle the news (“that is no big deal”), brush it off with a flat “nice,” or turn the talk to yourself are unlikely to bring the same benefit.

The practice is simple. When someone shares good news, ask one more question, such as “how did it happen?” or “how did it feel?” Even if your responsive joy score came out low, this is a behavior you can add, one conversation at a time.

Feeling someone’s pain too deeply can wear you out. Researchers distinguish empathy, sharing another person’s distress as it is, from compassion, a warm wish for the other person to be well (Singer and Klimecki, 2014). Too much of the first can turn into “empathic distress,” where you become so upset that you end up pulling away from the person. What people often call empathy fatigue or compassion fatigue is close to this empathic distress.

In one training study, people who first trained in feeling others’ suffering reported more negative feelings when watching distressing videos, but after a following course of compassion training their negative feelings fell again and their positive feelings rose (Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard and Singer, 2014). The researchers suggested that compassion may serve as a way of coping with empathic distress.

In daily life, you can try making that shift. When someone’s feelings sweep you up, do not stop at “this hurts me too”; turn the thought to “I hope this person feels a little better, so what can I do?” If other people’s emotions shake you unusually hard, how to cope as a highly sensitive person may help. If caring for others has gone on so long that you feel drained, the burnout self-check can show where you are.

The test’s decision style score shows how much you lean on feelings when making important decisions. A review of 35 years of research on emotion and decision making concludes that emotions are potent, pervasive and fairly predictable drivers of judgments and choices, sometimes harmful and sometimes beneficial (Lerner, Li, Valdesolo and Kassam, 2015).

The same review separates feelings that come from the decision itself from feelings carried over from something unrelated, the way irritation from a bad commute can spill into turning down an evening plan. So rather than treating deciding with feelings as the problem, it can help to check once whether the feeling you have now comes from this decision or has followed you in from somewhere else.

The habit of checking in with your own emotions is the ground for that check. Even in an experiment where people named the emotions shown on other people’s faces, picking a word for the feeling weakened the amygdala’s response (Lieberman et al., 2007). It was not about their own feelings, but it hints that putting a feeling into words can help you step back from it. If your score for checking in with feelings came out low, start by writing down your mood in one word once a day.

Q. Is empathy something you are born with? A. Temperament is thought to play a part, but empathy is not fixed. A training study on empathy and compassion found emotional responses changing after practice (Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard and Singer, 2014). Deciding which kind of empathy you want to grow makes practice easier.

Q. If I am a T in MBTI, does that mean I lack empathy? A. You cannot conclude that. A thinking preference and empathy may be slightly linked on average, but empathy has several parts, and people who are less swept up by feelings can still be good at seeing others’ perspective. The empathy & emotion style test does not measure perspective taking, but it shows empathy warmth and decision style separately, so you can tell deciding with your head apart from feeling less.

Q. I empathize so much that it exhausts me. What can I do? A. Do not stop at hurting along with the other person; shift your focus to wishing them well and to small things you can do. Setting a limit on how much help you can give is also a way to keep empathy going for the long run. If exhaustion and low mood last more than two weeks, the depression check-in (PHQ-9) can help you see where you are before you talk to a professional; it is not a diagnosis.

Q. What are the signs of someone lacking empathy? A. It is hard to say that a person simply lacks empathy. Some people are clumsy at taking others’ perspective yet feel deeply for people in difficulty, and some are the reverse. Rather than a label, it helps more to add concrete behaviors one at a time, such as asking instead of guessing, or asking one more question about good news.

References: Davis (1983), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44(1), 113-126, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.44.1.113; Eyal, Steffel & Epley (2018), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 114(4), 547-571, https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000115; Gable, Reis, Impett & Asher (2004), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87(2), 228-245, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.87.2.228; Singer & Klimecki (2014), Current Biology 24(18), R875-R878, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.06.054; Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard & Singer (2014), Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 9(6), 873-879, https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nst060; Lerner, Li, Valdesolo & Kassam (2015), Annual Review of Psychology 66, 799-823, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115043; Lieberman et al. (2007), Psychological Science 18(5), 421-428, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x; Barchard (2001), IPIP scales related to emotional intelligence.