Heidi Maibom is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati and Distinguished Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country. She works on empathy, moral emotions, wellbeing, psychopathology, and responsibility. Her book on empathy and perspective taking, The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works is coming out with OUP soon.
A post by Heidi Maibom
It is common in the empathy literature to distinguish between cognitive and affective empathy. The former is based mainly on cognition, the idea goes, and is aimed at providing knowledge of other minds. The latter is based in affect, and its main purpose is to foster prosocial behavior and interpersonal connection. Perspective taking is usually placed in the cognitive empathy camp, as it is thought to be a purely cognitive exercise whereby we transpose ourselves into another’s situation. Some have argued that this method is particularly apt to produce affective empathy as a result, but that doesn’t really alter its cognitive status. I think this way of thinking is a mistake. Affective empathy is as well, if not better, placed to yield interpersonal understanding. How?
The most important reason is that emotions aren’t just feelings, but they are also appraisals; they narrow and focus the attention, they motivate us, they change the way our body feels and the way we hold ourselves, and they encourage certain styles of thinking. This more expansive view of the nature of emotion applies equally to empathic affect. And so, feeling what another feels doesn’t just provide information about the emotion they are experiencing, but also about a more global form of experiencing the world and of being in that particular moment. Affective empathy is a powerful source of information about other people!
The practiced reader will immediately object that emotionally empathizing with someone hardly means that our experience is just like the other person’s experience. For that to be true, we must be near clones of one another. We must have had similar experiences, similar associations, similar attitudes to experiencing the emotion, and so on. If we do not, there are myriad ways in which our experiences might differ. At best, affective empathy can give us a crude picture of what the other person experiences.
The objector is, of course, right, but is also far too pessimistic. As philosophers we are trained to look for exceptions to ideas, which we do with gusto. The problem is that we then accord these counterexamples much greater importance than they warrant. Because I feel sad at your loss because I believe you do, I cannot claim to be experiencing what you do; that is true. But it doesn’t mean that I am not able to glean much about your situation from my empathic sadness.
Your sadness and my sadness don’t have to be exactly alike in order for my sadness to give me valuable information about your experience. Why not? Because sadness limits the space of options for what is attended to, the way in which the world is seen to impact us, our options, and the form of our thoughts. This limitation is important because one of the problems people typically bring up about imagining being in someone else’s shoes is that we need so much information about the other person that it is essentially impossible to do. But now suppose you have a natural way of limiting your imagination that is very similar to the way in which the other person’s experience is limited by his emotions. Then, instead of attempting to imaginatively transform yourself into this other person to see what you, so transformed, would do in his situation, your imagination is already limited in ways relevant to understanding that person’s experience or situation. This natural limit is, course, the emotion. It doesn’t narrow the space of options to one, but it doesn’t have to in order to put us on track to understanding the other person in that particular situation.
But now it might seem like I’ve put the cart before the horse. For do I not already have to know about the other person’s feelings and their situation in order to affectively empathize with them? What, then, is the added extra of affective empathy?
But surely understanding what another person is going through—her thoughts, feelings, hopes, wants, and so on—involves more than simply knowing that she is sad her cat died, say. Part of that might be knowing what it’s like to lose something or someone you deeply care about. But the peculiar way sadness paints the world, affects what other thoughts we have, limits our attention to other sad features of our existence, and these are not simply things that spring from knowing our friend is sad. One would have to know a bunch of stuff about emotions and human psychology. However, once we are in the state of sadness ourselves, our cognitive and emotional economy is already calibrated in such a way that when we imagine our friend’s experience, we are likely to be on the right track to understanding it. Of course, being sad for our friend isn’t magic. It doesn’t extract her thoughts. But, in ordinary instances of emotional empathy, we also know something about the situation the person is in. The cat dying, say. Our imagination works within the space of the emotion and its object, which is to say in a highly limited fashion.
Emotional empathy is not the only way we can imagine with emotions. Emotional contagion is another. In emotional contagion we catch, as it were, an emotion from someone else. It is a process that is not well understood—although there are reasons to think facial mimicry plays a central role—but it is well documented. Philosophers usually discuss contagion to contrast it with empathic affect. But emotional contagion isn’t quite private or personal either. It is a result of our sensitivity to the emotions of others. Mental health practitioners have long noted the transfer that takes place within the therapeutic context. In the USA, Thomas Ogden is famous for his so-called analytic third, which describes the co-created experience between therapist and client.
In his seminal paper on the topic, Ogden describes his thoughts wandering during a session and his ensuing emotions. Instead of simply dismissing his experience as a break in concentration, he dwells on the tone and significance of his ‘reverie.’ In it, he finds a deepening understanding of his client’s experience both in the analysis and in his family. Sharing that experience with the patient has a profound effect. It is important to note that Ogden doesn’t just draw his own conclusions and then impose them on his client. He verifies them with him.
Ogden’s idea that the analyst and client co-create an experience within the context of the analysis applies more widely to our relationships with other people. Emotions, moods, and attitudes flow between us often below the level of consciousness. Much of this enables fluid social interaction. But we can interrogate what we feel when we are with other people and use it as a guide to imagining what their experience is like, what are their thoughts and feelings, and what is happening between us. The reason this can provide the grounds for understanding others is what I have described before, namely the limiting effect on evaluations, motivation, attention, and styles of thinking that is inherent in experiencing an emotion.
Here, I have merely scratched the surface of what we might hope to find when we consider imagination within the context on affect, but it is a subject well worth exploring by analytic philosophers (it being more popular with phenomenologists).
Relevant literature:
Chemero, A. 2016. Sensorimotor empathy. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23, 138-52.
Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J.T., and Rapson, R.L. 1994. Emotional Contagion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Maibom, H.L. Forthcoming. The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ogden, T.H. 1994. The analytic third: Working with intersubjective clinical facts. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 75, 3-19.