The 6 Essential Aspects of Empathy

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When I was asked to write a book on empathy back in 2012, I dove into the research and found a great deal of confusion and a great many things that concerned me.

First, there was very little agreement about how empathy worked, what empathy was, or whether compassion was better overall. You want to see this kind of confusion in a young science, but it was very hard to organize my thinking, so I entered grad school to be able to access the research directly. For better or worse.

Seeking a Big-Tent Model of Empathy

My intentions in developing my book were to create a model of empathy that would work for everyone. For people whose empathy was painfully high, I wanted to provide a clear understanding of what that meant and how to address it.

For people who struggled to empathize, I wanted an overview of empathy that could help them approach empathy systematically and find their own way to access it at will.

But what I found as I dove deeper into the research was a continual push to exile people and create a hierarchy of humanness. Gender essentialism and sexism were everywhere: Boys and men were usually exiled from empathy and treated as emotionally backward, while women and girls who struggled with empathy were not even mentioned. Empathy was expected from women and girls and denied to men and boys. Autistic people were absolutely exiled as unempathic, even though most of my autistic friends and family members are hyper-empathic to the point of physical pain.

People struggling with narcissism, psychopathy, and sociopathy were endlessly trotted out as scary circus sideshows, as if their humanity didn't matter. And while I found some useful studies and books, I also found a horror show of dehumanization and near-gleeful exiling in empathy research.

I knew that a new, humane, and fully operationalized model of empathy was necessary.

Assembling a New Model

I found many useful pieces of research about different aspects of empathy that I could build upon, and I spent a few months winnowing through them and deciding which ones were most useful and where they should appear in my model.

I ended up with six aspects that are essential to understanding empathy, working with it intentionally, and moderating it so that empathizing can be comfortable and accessible (no matter where people start).

I also built my model to help people develop empathy that's sustainable throughout their lifetimes in order to address the compassion fatigue and empathic burnout we see all around us.

In 2013, I published The Art of Empathy (because empathy was not a science then, and it still isn't now) and I began sharing my model. My book has now been translated into five languages, and has informed empathy education in schools, workplaces, and healthcare organizations across the world.

The Good News: Empathy Can Be Developed (or Calmed Down) at Any Age

The most hopeful thing I discovered is that empathy isn't a concrete trait, and that it can be moderated at any stage of a person's life. Empathy is best described as an interaction instead of a trait, because even when people tend toward high trait empathy, they can face situations that drop their empathy to zero (we all can).

For instance, hierarchies have a famously damaging effect on empathy, where people at the top tend to lose their empathic abilities (even if their trait empathy was high when they came into the hierarchy) while people at the bottom often need to develop hyper-empathy as a kind of counterbalance (and to keep themselves safe).

Empathy is not so much a trait as it is an interaction, which means that empathy is malleable and situation-specific. When researchers grade entire groups of people as unempathic, they misunderstand the very nature of empathy.

Enter the Six Essential Aspects of Empathy

My six aspects pull from research across many disciplines and appear in a step-by-step order based on the conditions that are required for successful empathizing to occur.

Empathy Essential Reads

The Mystery of Human Kindness

The Paradox of Empathy

1. Emotion Contagion (or Emotional Awareness): Before empathy can take place, you need to sense that an emotion is occurring—or that an emotion is expected of you. Empathy relies upon your ability to detect, feel, and share emotions. Empathy is first and foremost an emotional skill.
2. Empathic Accuracy: Skilled empathy is based on your ability to accurately identify and understand emotions and intentions in yourself and others. When you can clearly understand which emotions are present (once you become aware of them), you can make appropriate responses and take suitable actions.
3. Emotion Regulation: To empathize effectively, you need to recognize, understand, and work with your own emotions; you’ve got to be self-aware. When you can identify and regulate your emotions, you’ll tend to be skillful in the presence of strong emotions (your own and others’), rather than being overtaken or knocked out of commission by them. Good news: developing a stronger emotional vocabulary—all by itself—can increase your emotion regulation skills.
4. Perspective-Taking: This skill helps you imaginatively put yourself in the place of others, see situations through their eyes, and accurately sense what they might be feeling. This skill helps you understand clearly—from their perspective and not yours—what others want or need. In this aspect, we clearly see the difference between empathy (providing what others need) and generosity (offering what you assume they might like).
5. Concern for Others: Empathy helps you connect with others, but the quality of your response depends on whether you care about them or not. Your sensitive concern will help you engage and empathize in a way that displays your care and compassion. As you may know, fatigue and overwhelm can reduce your concern for others to zero, so monitoring your own inner health is a key to being able to empathize skillfully.
6. Perceptive Engagement: This is your ability to respond empathically to others. This full expression of your empathy is dependent upon the first five aspects, and it helps you respond or act* wisely in a way that works for others. Perceptive engagement combines your capacity to sense and accurately identify the emotions of others (and yourself), skillfully regulate your own emotions, take the perspective of others, focus on them with care and concern, and then engage perceptively. Perceptive engagement helps you clearly understand others’ feelings, desires, and needs so that you can empathize skillfully while respecting your own feelings and needs as well.

*A note about action: Sometimes, the most empathic thing you can do is nothing at all, if people need space and privacy. Many people (and many researchers) want to see an empathic action, such as consolation, offering a helping hand, or communicating out loud. But sometimes, the most empathic thing you can do is nothing, for instance, when people are trying to hide their tears, when they're too angry to speak, when they feel ashamed of needing help, or when they signal that they're not available. ​​

With this six-aspects model, you'll be able to understand how and when to offer help (or not), because you'll know how empathy works and how you can key into what others want and need.