Empathy: The Science of Knowing Others

Empathy is a complex nursing intervention guided by a wide variety of moral, cognitive, affective and behavioral skills (Mercer & Reynolds, 2002).

To keep things simple, we will categorize empathy into one of two broad categories:

• Emotional empathy:  A sensitivity to feeling the emotional states of other people.
• Cognitive empathy:  The ability to understand other people’s perspectives, outside of their own perspective.

(Decety & Holvoet, 2021).

Both emotional and cognitive empathy are essential to developing therapeutic relationships and coming to understand your patient in care (Derksen et al., 2013).

Did You Know?!? The word “empathy” comes from the Greek words “em-” (in)  and “pathos-” (feeling). In the late 1800s, psychologists had developed the concept of empathy to explain how emotions were influenced by sensory experiences (Fernandez & Zahavi, 2020).  Early ideas of empathy, therefore, were closely aligned with today’s concept of ‘emotional intelligence’.