Earlier in this module, it was noted that emotional empathy (i.e., affective empathy or emotional contagion) was one of two types of empathy nurses may express. Since empathy is a social emotion, it maintains close connections to our internal emotions and body states (Eslinger et al., 2021).
Emotional empathy is best described as being sensitive to a shift in your own emotions based on the emotional states perceived in other people. This transference of emotional states may result in a ‘shared’ emotion (Herzog, 2016). According to Herzog (2016), emotion sharing in the context of a therapeutic relationship is either active or passive: