The Importance of Empathy

Take our Empathy Test

Find a therapist near me

Swap draining affective empathy for cognitive empathy to understand others without losing your perspective.

Avoid empathic tunnel vision to prevent unfair biases and emotional burnout.

Adopt rational compassion over emotional "quick fixes."

The end of the semester is drawing near, which means we are about to receive a few emails that pull out all the stops. Drama! Intrigue! Crisis! As professors, there are a few things that are guaranteed in our lives, but the last-ditch effort email to raise a grade is one of them.

Opening a message filled with anguish from a student who we know has been struggling all semester tugs at our heartstrings. Our empathy is piqued, and it makes us want to fix it for them.

But we don’t. Why? No, it’s not because we are heartless monsters. It’s because we know that empathy is tricky.

All humans experience two types of empathy: Affective and Cognitive. Affective empathy makes our motor neurons fire, mimicking the feelings of the individual in distress. If we lean into affective empathy with every email, we face several issues.

Biological self-sabotage: Affective empathy makes us literally feel the student’s pain as our own. Our brains don’t differentiate between “their” pain and “our” pain, so this can be draining, heavy, and laden with guilt. It also releases the stress hormone cortisol, which can lead to empathetic distress. A state in which your nervous system becomes exhausted from viewing every email as your own crisis.

Biological self-sabotage: Affective empathy makes us literally feel the student’s pain as our own. Our brains don’t differentiate between “their” pain and “our” pain, so this can be draining, heavy, and laden with guilt. It also releases the stress hormone cortisol, which can lead to empathetic distress. A state in which your nervous system becomes exhausted from viewing every email as your own crisis.

Burnout: Without guardrails, an inbox full of distress can lead to burnout. As a result, we may indiscriminately shut down our affective empathy just to protect ourselves. But then our empathy........

© Psychology Today