Empathy is generally described as the ability to understand another person's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience. It's a multifaceted concept involving social, cognitive, and emotional processes. Contemporary researchers often distinguish between affective empathy, which involves feeling another's emotions, and cognitive empathy, which is the ability to identify and understand other people's emotions. Empathy is not the same as sympathy; empathy involves putting yourself in someone else's shoes, while sympathy is feeling concern for someone else.
Neuroscience suggests that empathy has deep evolutionary, biochemical, and neurological underpinnings. Studies of mirror neurons, which activate both when we perform an action and when we observe someone else performing that action, attempt to measure the neural basis for human mind-reading and emotion-sharing abilities and thereby explain the basis of the empathy reaction. Brain regions involved in empathy include the brainstem, amygdala, hypothalamus, basal ganglia, insula, and orbitofrontal cortex. Research indicates that empathy is crucial for establishing relationships and behaving compassionately.
