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Definition:
Emotion Sharing: Observing someone's emotions and feeling similarly.
Compassion: Caring about another person's emotional state, regardless of what they are feeling.
Perspective-Taking: Cognitively understanding and adopting another person's viewpoint, often described as "putting yourself in their shoes"
Empathy–the capacity to understand, share, and care about the emotions of others–is a critical aspect of human psychology.
Despite the wealth of experiments on empathy, we lack a descriptive account of how it is experienced in daily life. Experimentation is critical, but description is also necessary and has too often been neglected in psychology (Rozin, 2001).
"The Experience of Empathy in Everyday Life
We used experience sampling to examine perceptions of empathy in the everyday lives of a group of 246 U.S. adults who were quota sampled to represent the population on key demographics. Participants reported an average of about nine opportunities to empathize per day; these experiences were positively associated with prosocial behavior, a relationship not found with trait measures. Although much of the literature focuses on the distress of strangers, in everyday life, people mostly empathize with very close others, and they empathize with positive emotions 3 times as frequently as with negative emotions. Although trait empathy was negatively associated only with well-being, empathy in daily life was generally associated with increased well-being. Theoretically distinct components of empathy—emotion sharing, perspective taking, and compassion—typically co-occur in everyday empathy experiences. Finally, empathy in everyday life was higher for women and the religious but not significantly lower for conservatives and the wealthy.
The inconsistency with which empathy has been defined has been rightfully criticized (Hall & Schwartz, 2019), but many researchers think empathy involves sharing someone’s emotion (an emotional process), taking someone’s perspective (a cognitive process), and feeling compassionate and wanting to help (a motivational process). There is no consensus about whether these components—emotion sharing, perspective taking, and compassion—are distinct or different sides of the same empathy construct (Zaki, 2014). There is evidence that they can be differentiated (Winter et al., 2017). However, these components may be tightly intertwined for most people, even if they are technically dissociable (Fiske, 2009; Zaki & Ochsner, 2012). The lack of clarity around whether the components of empathy co-occur contributes to the general confusion about how to define empathy (Batson, 2009; Cuff et al., 2014). Unfortunately, few studies have actually examined empathy in daily life to test the perceived co-occurrence of emotion sharing, perspective taking, and compassion."