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Editorial: Empathy in a Broader Context: Development, Mechanisms, Remediation

S. Surguladze,D. Bergen-Cico

Published 2020 in Frontiers in Psychiatry

ABSTRACT

Empathy has long been a subject of interest of social sciences, starting with the concept of Einfühlung (“in-feeling” or “feeling into”) as the human capacity to feel the emotions that the artist or writer had worked to represent (1). Later on, Theodor Lipps transformed Einfühlung from a concept of aesthetics into a central category of the philosophy of the social and human sciences and postulated that Einfühlung meant the “experience of another human” underpinned by “inner imitation” or instinctive kinaesthetic sensations in the observer as felt by the observed target (2). The word empathy was introduced to English-speaking world by E.B. Titchener (3) who translated Einfühlung by using Greek em(“in'”) and pathos, (“feeling”, “suffering”, or “pity”). This heralded the beginning of new, psychological research into the phenomenon, followed by operationalising the concepts of empathy thus firmly rooting it in the fields of sociology and psychology. The empathy is considered as a multifaceted construct encompassing (1) affective empathy, i.e., affective sharing, (2) empathic concern: motivation to caring for another's welfare, and (3) perspective taking or cognitive empathy, the ability to consciously put oneself into the mind of another and understand what that person is thinking or feeling (4). Through the recent advances in neuroscience, researchers have begun to identify possible biological mechanisms of empathy (5) that human beings may share with higher mammals (6). The papers in this Research Topic present novel neuroscience research in addition to socially diverse research examining skills, psychology, and interpersonal factors that modulate empathy in specific contexts. Despite more than a century of descriptive research into empathy, the definition, and phenomenology of the empathy are still evolving and inquiry is broadening. One of the interesting lines of inquiry centers on whether or not cognitive and affective empathy are part of the same concept. This question is addressed in a paper in this Research Topic (Stietz et al.) where the authors argue that the aspects of perspective-taking and affective empathy should not be blended into unifying (“umbrella term”) concept of empathy; but rather consider as distinct neurobiological and phenomenological processes. Sindermann et al.‘s study lends support to the above notion by demonstrating sexual dimorphism between cognitive and affective empathy. The authors explored the relationship

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