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’. |