[Jungian Cognitive Functions] Cognitive Empathy or Emotional Empathy or Empathic Concern

[SearchingforPeace]

I have been reading Focus by Daniel Goleman (author of Emotional Intelligence) and encountered his discussion of empathy.

He outlines three types that researchers have found: Cognitive Empathy, Emotional Empathy, and Empathic Concern. I thought to bring this to discuss here rather than in blog.

Now I have read numerous old Fe vs. Fi threads which cover the topic. Some were very heated. I have got into discussions with others here as well in various places about the topic.

Fi users tend to set forth an idea that Fe users don't have empathy, but only sympathy, which Fe users reject and it goes off from there.

Anyway, back to Goleman

Supersensitive reading of emotional signals represents the zenith of cognitive empathy, one of three varieties of the ability to focus on what other people experience. This variety of empathy lets us take other's perspective, comprehend their mental state, and at the same time manage our own emotions while we take stock of theirs. These can be top-down operations.

In contrast, with emotional empathy we join the other person in feeling along with him or her; our bodies resonante in whatever key of joy or sorrow thwt person may be going through. Such attunement tends to occur through automatic, spontaneous---and bottom-up---brain circuits.

While cognitive or emotional empathy means we recognize what another person thinks and resonante with their feelings, it does not necessarily led to sympathy, concern for others' welfare. The third variety, empathic concern, goes further: leading us to care about them, moblizing us to help if need be. This compassionate attitude builds up bottom-up primal systems for caring and attachment deep down in the brain, those these mix with more reflective, top-down circuits that evaluate how much we value their well-being.

Our circuity for empathy was designed for face-to-face moments. Today, working together online poses special challenges for empathy. Take, for example, that familiar moment in a meeting when everyone has reached a tacit consensus, and one person then articulates aloud what everyone already knows but has not said: "Okay, then, we all agree on this." Heads nod.

But coming to such consensus in an onkine text-based discussion requires flying blinr, without relying on the continuous cascade of nonverbal messages that in a real meeting let someone announce aloud the as-yet-unspoken agreement. We can base our reading of others only on what they have to say. Beyond that, there's reading berween the lines: online werely on cognitive empathy, the variety of mind-reading that let's us infer what's going on in someone else's mind.

Now, I will put his definitions of all three types of empathy into separate posts.

 

[SearchingforPeace]

Cognitive Empathy

Quoting more from Focus by Daniel Goleman


Cognitive empathy gives us the ability to understand another person's ways of seeing and of thinking. Seeing through the eyes of others and thinking along their lines helps you choose language that fits their way of understanding.

This ability, as cognitive scientists putit, demands "additional computational mechanisms": we need to think about feelings.
...
An inquisitive nature, which predisposes us to learn from everybody, feeds our cognitive empathy, amplifying our understanding of other people's worlds.
...
The earliest roots in life of such perspective-taking trace to the ways infants learn the basic building blocks of emotional lif3, such as how their own states differ from other people's and how people react to the feelings they express. This most basic emotional understanding marks the first time an infant can tak4 another person's point of view, entertain several perspectives, and share meaning with other people.
...
The executive circuits that allow us to think about our own thoughts and feelings let us apply the same reasoning to other people's minds. "Theory of mind," understanding that oter people have their own feelings, desires, and motives, let us reason what someone else might be thinking and wanting. Such cognitive empathy shares circuitry with executive attention; it first blooms around the years two and five and continues to develop right through the teen years.

.......................

Now, from my understanding, this sounds very Fi like. Fi Doms are said to know their own feelings deep down so well that they can relate to the feelings of others by looking into themselves.

I do this as well though I run with Fe, so it may not be a Fe vs Fi thing at all. I start thinking about feelings that others may be experiencing. I can feel tem deeply, getting overwhelmed by their pain and suffering and joys and pains, and explain this to others, even when I have never met the person.

Twice recently I have helped NFP women understand what NFJ men in their lives were experiencing after their daughters were raped. In both cases, the NFP woman were shocked about how well I understand these men without ever meeting them, giving them deep insights that neither one could find answers to themselves, even though they thought they knew them well. In both cases, I was able easily place myself into their shoes and feel deep and powerful feelings.

Do you Fi and Fe users relate to cognitive empathy and does this feel like how you experience empathy?

 

[SearchingforPeace]

Darker Side of Cognitive Empathy

Goleman goes in to discuss one of the problems with cognitive empathy alone.

From Focus:

A darker side of cognitive empathy emerges when someone uses it to spot weakness in others and so takes advantage of them. This strategy typifies sociopaths, who use cognitive empathy to manipulate. They feel no anxiety, and so the threat of a punishment does not deter them.

The classic work on sociopaths (they were known as "psychopaths" back then), the 1941 book The Mask of Sanity, by Harvey M. Cleckley, describes them as concealung "an irresponsible personality" behind "a perfect mimcry of normal emotion, fine intelligence, and social responsibility." The irresponsible part emergesin a history of pathological lying, living off others as a parasite, and the like. Tellingly, other indicators signal deficits in attention, such as bored distractibility, poor impulse control, and a lack of emotional empathy or sympathy for others in distress.
.....
Sociopaths, like their close cousins"Machiavellian personalities," are able to read others' emotions but register facial expressions in a different part of their brains than the rest of us do.

Instead of registering emotions in their brain's limbic centers, sociopaths show activity in their frontal areas, particularly language centers. They tell themselves about emotions, but do not feel them directly as other people do; instead of a normal bottom-up emotional reaction, sociopaths "feel" top-down.


.................

My brother, an ENTP, acted very sociopathic growing up. He was intentionally distructive and hateful and verbally and emotionally abuse. He rejoiced when he persuaded my mom to leave my father. He seemed to have no connection to the feelings of others, though he knew others well.

Only around 35 did he start to care about others. Recently we talked on this. He said he just felt that our parents were extremely unhappy in their marriage and so nudged it along, uncaring of the damage to them or the siblings.

I worry my 10 year old is a sociopath. He exhibits all of the traits as well....he is a ESFP, most likely.

 

[SearchingforPeace]

Emotional Empathy

Emotional empathy, sensing what other people feel and caring about them, has ancient roots in evolution; we share this circuitry with other mammals, who like us need a keen attention to an infant's signal of distress. Emotional empathy operates bottom-up: much of the neural wiring for directly sensing the feelings of others lies beneath the cortex in ancient parts of the brain that "think fast,"but not deeply. These circuits tune us in by arousing in our own body the emotional state picked up in the other person.

Take listening to a griping story. Brain studies show that when people listen to someone telling such a story, the brains of the listeners become intimately coupled with that of the storyteller. The listener's brain patterns echo those of the storyteller with precision,though lagging by a second or two. And the brains of those with the very best understanding---who are fully focused and comprehend most--do something surprising: certain patterns of their brains' activities anticipate that of the storyteller by a second or two.

The ingredients of rapport begin with total shared focus between two people, which leads to an unconscious physical synchrony, which in turn generates good feeling. Such a shared focus with a teacher puts a child's brain in the best mode for learning.
....
Empathy depends upon a muscle of attention: to tune in to others' feelings requires we pick up the facial, vocal, and other signals of their emotion. The anterior cingulate, a part of the attention network, tunes us to someone's distress by t forapping our own amygdala, which resonates with that distress. In this snese, emotional empathy is "embodied"-- we actually feel in our physiology what's going on in the body of the other person.

When volunteers had their braind imaged while they watched another person get a painful shock, their own pain circuitry lit up in what amounts to a neural simulation of the other person's suffering.

Tania Singer has found that we empathize with others' pain via our anterior insula--the same area we us3 to s3nse how our ownmpain feels. So, we first sense another's emotions within ourselves, as our brains appli4s tomthe other person's feelings the identical system used to read our own feeling states. Empathy builds on our capacity for sensing visceral feelings within our own body.
.....
The brain's very design seems to integrate self-awareness with empathy by packing the way we pick up information about ourselves ane about others withint the same far-flung neural networks. One clever part: asour mirror neurons and oter social circuitry re-create in our brain and body what's going on with the other person, our insula summates all that. Empathy entails an act of self-awareness: we read other people by tuning in to ourselves


....................................

The bottom-up empathy sounds very much like Fe....I don't need to cognitively process the emotions of others....I just get them delivered into my own body. There isn't a need to put myself in someone's shoes.....I just am. A million little clues help, but beyond that I feel strong emotions ftom others, even when their words, tone, etc. say otherwise.

But as the section went on, it started to sound more Fi-like, as it discussed tuning into ourselves.....

 

[SearchingforPeace]

Empathic Concern

From Focus:

Compassion builds on empathy, which in turn requires a focus on othere. If self-absorbed, we simply do not notice other people; we can walk by utterly indifferent to their predicament. But once we notice them we can tune in, sense their feelings and needs, and act on our concern.

Empathic concern, which is what you want in your physician, boss, or spous4 (not to mention yourself), has substrates in the enural architecture for parenting. In mammals, this circuitry compels attention and concern for babies and the young, who can't survive without their parents. Watch where people's eyes go when someone brings an adorable baby into a room, and you see the mammlian brain center leap into action.

Empathic concern first emerges in infancy: when one baby hears another cry, she, too, starts crying. This response is triggered by the amygdala, the brain's radar for danger (as well as a site for primal emotions both negative and positive). One neural theory holds that the amygdala drives bottom-up circuits in the brain of the baby who hears crying to feel the same sadness and upset. Simultaneously top-down circuits release oxytocin, the chemical for caring, which stirs a rudimentary sense of concern and goodwill in the second bsby.

Empathic concern, then, is a double edged feeling. On the one handcthere is implicit discomfort from direct experience in one person of the distress of the other combined with the same concern a parent feels toward her child. But we aldo add to our caring instinct a social equation that weighs how much we value the other person's well-being.

Getting this bottom-up/top-down mix right has great implications. Those in whom the stirring of sympathetic feelings becomes too strong can suffer themselves--in the helping professions this can sometimes lead to emotional exhaustion and compassion fatigue. And those who protect themselves against sympathetic distress by deadening feeling can lose touch with empathy. The neural road to empathic concern takes top-down management of personal distress without numbing us to the pain of others.

While volunteers listened to tales of people subjected to physical pain, brain scans revealed that their own brain centers for experiencing pain lit up instantly. But if the story was about psychological suffering, it took relatively longer to activate the higher brwin centers involved in empathic concern and compassion. As the research team put it, it takes time to tell "the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation."

Moral sentiments derive from empathy, and moral reflections take thinking and focus. One cost of the frentic stream of distractions we face today, some fear, is anerosion of empathy and compassion. The more distracted we are, the less we can exhibit attunement and caring.

 

[Coriolis]

So how, then, would this model account for the process of understanding someone's concerns through factual knowledge of their situation, and acting in a way that would appear to be compassionate, but based on some shared goal, or the simple knowledge that one can help?

For instance, say Jack learns his colleague Bill's mother has just passed away. He understands this will be a stressful and busy time for Bill. He will probably need to be out for awhile. Jack can therefore anticipate some of Bill's professional and even personal needs, and step in to address what he can, and offer to help as needed. Jack does not actually feel what Bill feels. He may remember how he felt when his mother died, but understands that emotions are very personal, so cannot assume Bill feels the same. Jack offers to help because both he and Bill value keeping things on track at work, and Jack also values helping people with problems if he is able. He appreciated when others did the same for him.

 

[SearchingforPeace]

So how, then, would this model account for the process of understanding someone's concerns through factual knowledge of their situation, and acting in a way that would appear to be compassionate, but based on some shared goal, or the simple knowledge that one can help?

For instance, say Jack learns his colleague Bill's mother has just passed away. He understands this will be a stressful and busy time for Bill. He will probably need to be out for awhile. Jack can therefore anticipate some of Bill's professional and even personal needs, and step in to address what he can, and offer to help as needed. Jack does not actually feel what Bill feels. He may remember how he felt when his mother died, but understands that emotions are very personal, so cannot assume Bill feels the same. Jack offers to help because both he and Bill value keeping things on track at work, and Jack also values helping people with problems if he is able. He appreciated when others did the same for him.

Cognitive empathy. Thinking about feeling. Can lead some to empathic concern.

It is about focusing on others and their needs.

Not everyone is wired the same, but for some, they are wired to pick up on the emotions of others and feel them in the same manner.

I didn't include all the chapter, but he introduced empathic concern with the Good Samaritan. The forest two walking were not moved to act.....they didn't want to get involved. Their focus never was on the individual enough to put them in that mode.

Empathy can start top-down or bottom-up. Primal empathy that those with emotional empathy have, is very bottom up. It is what leads mammals to care for their young for so long.

As noted in the section on sociopaths, they score high in cognitive empathy but it never connects to their own emotions, but stays in the language centers. So cognitive empathy does not force anyone to feel what others feel, unlike emotional empathy.

 

[Amargith]

The bottom-up empathy sounds very much like Fe....I don't need to cognitively process the emotions of others....I just get them delivered into my own body. There isn't a need to put myself in someone's shoes.....I just am. A million little clues help, but beyond that I feel strong emotions ftom others, even when their words, tone, etc. say otherwise.

But as the section went on, it started to sound more Fi-like, as it discussed tuning into ourselves.....

Funny, I was thinking the same thing about it sounding like Fi, tbh.

My earlier experiences as a teenager and before with the emotions of others were very much visceral like that. They were just...there. And I got into serious trouble because I would react to the emotional state of the person in front of me, instead of what came out of their mouth, and in doing so, I would accidentally expose them as liars, making them lose face and feel vulnerable in front of others -> My interpersonal skills were lagging behind, basically.

In fact, that's why I personally have always identified cognitive empathy (something I very much yearned to learn to help me mitigate and deal with the pain that I felt from others but could not mention; it helped me make sense of things) with Fe, myself. And it helped me feel less helpless and torn to pieces (especially if a mirror/amplification effect took place, where your mirror neutrons basically produce and project back to the person the same emotion, which just keeps ricocheting and makes the situation ten times worse for both parties) without any way to actually channel or control it.

It's interesting that we look at it differently, and may just indicate that Fe and Fi people just employ different methods to deal with similar things.

 

[SearchingforPeace]

Funny, I was thinking the same thing about it sounding like Fi, tbh.

My earlier experiences as a teenager and before with the emotions of others were very much visceral like that. They were just...there. And I got into serious trouble because I would react to the emotional state of the person in front of me, instead of what came out of their mouth, and in doing so, I would accidentally expose them as liars, making them lose face and feel vulnerable in front of others -> My interpersonal skills were lagging behind, basically.

In fact, that's why I personally have always identified cognitive empathy (something I very much yearned to learn to help me mitigate and deal with the pain that I felt from others but could not mention; it helped me make sense of things) with Fe, myself. And it helped me feel less helpless and torn to pieces (especially if a mirror/amplification effect took place, where your mirror neutrons basically produce and project back to the person the same emotion, which just keeps ricocheting and makes the situation ten times worse for both parties) without any way to actually channel or control it.

It's interesting that we look at it differently, and may just indicate that Fe and Fi people just employ different methods to deal with similar things.

I just know how I do it. My experience is much like yours. I don't need to think about feeling at all to feel strong emotions in others, even unexpressed. It is just something I have always felt, without referencing my own feelings.

Back when my wife was full of anger and hate constantly, I felt it oppressively. It was just there.

But when I want to go deeper, I consciously start thinking about a person, even those I have never met, and can easily put myself in their shoes cognitively. My ENFP likes to use me to understand her friends, even though she is very perceptive generally on people and feels connected very easily to others, much better than me....

Maybe it can't be described in Fe/Fi terms. Neurologists are not really working in Jungian frameworks, mostly.

 

[Amargith]

I just know how I do it. My experience is much like yours. I don't need to think about feeling at all to feel strong emotions in others, even unexpressed. It is just something I have always felt, without referencing my own feelings.

Back when my wife was full of anger and hate constantly, I felt it oppressively. It was just there.

But when I want to go deeper, I consciously start thinking about a person, even those I have never met, and can easily put myself in their shoes cognitively. My ENFP likes to use me to understand her friends, even though she is very perceptive generally on people and feels connected very easily to others, much better than me....

Maybe it can't be described in Fe/Fi terms. Neurologists are not really working in Jungian frameworks, mostly.

I hear ya, completely. I follow the exact same methodology - and it is also the thing that gives me a migraine to stay in an emotional toxic waste dump that others seem to just..not notice or at least ignore. Like family gatherings full of resentment and old scars...that's just a nightmare, for me - especially if NOBODY seems interested in changing that situation. It's like living in Smog City.

I do find that this forum has helped me with some people who mystified me because their circuitry is different than mine - mostly Fe-Ti people. The raw data is there but the processing and meaning is often different due to the different priorities and values they hold dear. And you need that intel in order to actually do the digging deeper though the digging deeper does work to some extent. Still, having someone explain to you how they work is golden to fill in all the ????

Your ENFP friend might just be utilising your specialisation to complete her own research to eventually obtain a full oversight

I know I do that any chance I get, myself.

 

[SearchingforPeace]

I hear ya, completely. I follow the exact same methodology - and it is also the thing that gives me a migraine to stay in an emotional toxic waste dump that others seem to just..not notice or at least ignore. Like family gatherings full of resentment and old scars...that's just a nightmare, for me - especially if NOBODY seems interested in changing that situation. It's like living in Smog City.

Oh, like my house, lol, with 4 mentally disturbed folks.... or my home growing up...

My ENFP friend struggles severely being around truly bad people. She says the disconnection is painful.

My solution from childhood was to reject emotions, especially negative ones. I thought I was sensing others emotions without feeling them....or being impacted by them. I realize now I just pushed them out of my conscious mind and thereby only felt the most intense emotions, missing out on the rest.

Coming to terms with this has been a struggle for half the year since I woke up. I look back to a few months ago and marvel that I was able to stay sane while dealing with children having psychotic episodes multiple times per day, plus my wife's issues. The first time I timed how long it took to recover I was shocked I had adrenaline pumping 2 hours after the episode.

I do find that this forum has helped me with some people who mystified me because their circuitry is different than mine - mostly Fe-Ti people. The raw data is there but the processing and meaning is often different due to the different priorities and values they hold dear. And you need that intel in order to actually do the digging deeper though the digging deeper does work to some extent. Still, having someone explain to you how they work is golden to fill in all the ????

Your ENFP friend might just be utilising your specialisation to complete her own research to eventually obtain a full oversight

I know I do that any chance I get, myself.

Definitely. I see the difference in processing. Similar data, different paths to understanding, but both coming to an understanding of others. It works great in tandem.

I definitely struggle more to understand myself than I do others, something I doubt any NFP would ever say. I need to externalize my feelings many times to understand them. By focusing on others, it helps me to also discover things about myself.

 

[Amargith]

My Ne,however, does love externalising and gathering different povs because it acts like a mirror back to mine - it underlines the contrast with how I work. Maybe INFPs have less of a need for it, but I certainly like to use it as a confirmation test of any hypothesis Fi has wrt to myself and who I am. I need those external parameters to compare and contrast in order to pinpoint my values, my priorities and how to utilise who I am to the best of my ability. It provides the context I so need, because what is data without context? I also use it as a way to discover bread crumbs that resonate with me and may shine a light on parts of myself that are hidden even to me - or especially to me, for that matter.

Even NFPs hide things in the shadows that they do not want to identify with or do not know what to deal with, unfortunately

One thing I learned from NFJs though is to step back a bit from others and look at the big picture - and in doing so, become a rock to the person in front of you. I used to think that doing so broke my empathic connection with the other person and basically meant being callous to them. Learning how to do that without breaking the connection helped me significantly reduce my own helplessness, and gave me the ability to intensify or reduce the connection without severing it. Before, it was like an on and off switch - kind of like a freezing/scalding shower with only those settings.

To resolve the situation however, you need both - you need to understand them well enough to know what they're going through, but you cannot actually fall into the same trap they're stuck in: being so overwhelmed by their emotions that you cannot see a way out.

That, in turn, allows me to actually analyse things instead of just feeling them and being literally along for the ride on their emotional rollercoaster. As handy as understanding someone is, and as useful as it is to know yourself, it does diddly squat for you in the department of actually channeling those emotions into something productive and managing them; executing the needed adjustments and improving on the outcome of the situation. The distance allows you to do that, while the being up close and personal is handy for the actual walking a mile in someone's shoes - or acknowledging your own state of mind.

 

[SearchingforPeace]

My Ne,however, does love externalising and gathering different povs because it acts like a mirror back to mine - it underlines the contrast with how I work. Maybe INFPs have less of a need for it, but I certainly like to use it as a confirmation test of any hypothesis Fi has wrt to myself and who I am. I need those external parameters to compare and contrast in order to pinpoint my values, my priorities and how to utilise who I am to the best of my ability. It provides the context I so need, because what is data without context? I also use it as a way to discover bread crumbs that resonate with me and may shine a light on parts of myself that are hidden even to me - or especially to me, for that matter.

Fascinating. I love how you describe this. It really illustrates the difference between INFP and ENFP and rings true with my experience with my ENFP friend.

Even NFPs hide things in the shadows that they do not want to identify with or do not know what to deal with, unfortunately

Oh, yes. Very hard to be fully accepting of self, even for a ENFP 4, I guess. But loving ourselves in full is just so liberating.....the closer I get to the core me, the more at peace I am, and I am a peace hound after all.

One thing I learned from NFJs though is to step back a bit from others and look at the big picture - and in doing so, become a rock to the person in front of you. I used to think that doing so broke my empathic connection with the other person and basically meant being callous to them. Learning how to do that without breaking the connection helped me significantly reduce my own helplessness, and gave me the ability to intensify or reduce the connection without severing it. Before, it was like an on and off switch - kind of like a freezing/scalding shower with only those settings.

Yes, I am working on being better at that. I have been a rock for my entire life, but without preparing a proper foundation for managing the situation. But I am improving....

I really like how you explained the NFJ big picture quality..... it is very accurate....

To resolve the situation however, you need both - you need to understand them well enough to know what they're going through, but you cannot actually fall into the same trap they're stuck in: being so overwhelmed by their emotions that you cannot see a way out.

That, in turn, allows me to actually analyse things instead of just feeling them and being literally along for the ride on their emotional rollercoaster. As handy as understanding someone is, and as useful as it is to know yourself, it does diddly squat for you in the department of actually channeling those emotions into something productive and managing them; executing the needed adjustments and improving on the outcome of the situation. The distance allows you to do that, while the being up close and personal is handy for the actual walking a mile in someone's shoes - or acknowledging your own state of mind.

Yeah, this is what I have been working on...... trying to better manage the balance here. Caring and understanding enough to help while not losing my footing in the process. I suspect it is something to refine for many years.

 

[Rambling]

Interesting. INTJ female here.

I'd say I have the cognitive empathy going on, I build internal models of other people in my head and then I can kind of get inside the mental head of my model person and thus feel what they feel by Ni intuiting it - this can produce really uncomfortable emotions inside me and also gets me motivated to step outside my comfort zone and ask them sort of like 'wow that must make you feel really xyz?' sort of questions, which allows me to find out whether my guesswork was correct. But I did feel intensely how they might have felt, so I'm feeling something then checking it not assuming it.

The emotional empathy I think that's certainly a different skill and the nearest I can come up with for that is that if I'm *watching* a storyteller I think I sort of unconsciously mimic their facial expressions, even just slightly, as I am absorbed in the story. And if you arrange your features into a scowl, you actually generate that exact emotion inside you, so you feel it exactly as the storyteller does...I read about this in a book recently, Paul Ekman was the author. So from mimicry the emotion is produced within the listener. And I know that is a different process.

Sometimes I use that if I'm puzzled by someone's reaction to something, maybe in a drama on TV or someone emoting with an odd facial expression, I will ask myself almost unconsciously 'how does it feel to pull your mouth down on one side like that' and try doing it discreetly on my own. And then the emotion arises within me.

So I think I use both methods but I am more curious about why the situation would give rise to the particular feeling, so was it threatening (leading to fear) or annoying (leading to anger) to be tailgated along the road, for example? The cognitive emotion method does help me more with that and with forming a mental picture of the person (they generally react more with fear, for example) than the mimicry method, so I think I use that more. Also, mimicry doesn't work so well in the text-based forum, but it works better with decoding children's feelings, for example.

The remark about sociopaths is interesting, I am very aware that I am making choices about what to do with the information I have guessed at using my Ni, and I greatly value my own integrity at this point so I wouldn't want to hurt someone or second guess them...that's where I see my inner integrity kicking in.

Fe / Fi I am not sure beyond this point. I don't think the two routes necessarily split Fi / Fe in a simple way.

 

[Coriolis]

Cognitive empathy. Thinking about feeling. Can lead some to empathic concern.

It is about focusing on others and their needs.

Not everyone is wired the same, but for some, they are wired to pick up on the emotions of others and feel them in the same manner.

I didn't include all the chapter, but he introduced empathic concern with the Good Samaritan. The forest two walking were not moved to act.....they didn't want to get involved. Their focus never was on the individual enough to put them in that mode.

Empathy can start top-down or bottom-up. Primal empathy that those with emotional empathy have, is very bottom up. It is what leads mammals to care for their young for so long.

As noted in the section on sociopaths, they score high in cognitive empathy but it never connects to their own emotions, but stays in the language centers. So cognitive empathy does not force anyone to feel what others feel, unlike emotional empathy.

That is what I have always thought, but the descriptions you quoted seemed to associate cognitive empathy with the ability to read people's emotional signals. I asked about this because it is how I approach situations, and I am not very sensitive to emotional signals, or at least not able to interpret them very well. I approach people in need by thinking about their cirumstances much moreso than their feelings, usually because I cannot be sure what they really are feeling, and I don't want to assume or to pry. Often it seems not to matter. My colleague out for several days due to a death in the family might need some meetings covered, regardless of whether he is broken-hearted over it or glad some crochety family troublemaker is gone. Bottom line: it's more that I know what the compassionate thing to do is rather than feeling it.

I'd say I have the cognitive empathy going on, I build internal models of other people in my head and then I can kind of get inside the mental head of my model person and thus feel what they feel by Ni intuiting it - this can produce really uncomfortable emotions inside me and also gets me motivated to step outside my comfort zone and ask them sort of like 'wow that must make you feel really xyz?' sort of questions, which allows me to find out whether my guesswork was correct. But I did feel intensely how they might have felt, so I'm feeling something then checking it not assuming it.

Questions like this are a huge pet peeve for me. I always think: why must I feel XYZ? Because you felt XYZ in a similar situation? It's good you don't assume, but if the question were asked with the intent of information gathering rather than the usual rhetorical statement, I would find it prying. Allow me to have my own feelings about the situation, and to keep them to myself.

So I think I use both methods but I am more curious about why the situation would give rise to the particular feeling, so was it threatening (leading to fear) or annoying (leading to anger) to be tailgated along the road, for example? The cognitive emotion method does help me more with that and with forming a mental picture of the person (they generally react more with fear, for example) than the mimicry method, so I think I use that more.

See, I would wonder less how being tailgated made the person feel, and more what actions they took to avoid it or guard against anything bad coming of it.

 

[KitchenFly]

As an INFP on a glance one way I could realistically identify with these three functions of Empathy is in this way and order.

F function observer-observer duality - Introverted. ( the first function the F function may be utilising the three into three view point as a contrast for an overall context via the three Instincts )

N function cognitive Empathy direct - extroverted. (3,6,9 Triangle)
S function emotional Empathy direct - extroverted (7,4,1 Triangle)
T function Empathic Concern direct - extroverted (2,5,8 Triangle)

 

[existence]

Supersensitive reading of emotional signals represents the zenith of cognitive empathy, one of three varieties of the ability to focus on what other people experience. This variety of empathy lets us take other's perspective, comprehend their mental state, and at the same time manage our own emotions while we take stock of theirs. These can be top-down operations.

In contrast, with emotional empathy we join the other person in feeling along with him or her; our bodies resonante in whatever key of joy or sorrow thwt person may be going through. Such attunement tends to occur through automatic, spontaneous---and bottom-up---brain circuits.

While cognitive or emotional empathy means we recognize what another person thinks and resonante with their feelings, it does not necessarily led to sympathy, concern for others' welfare. The third variety, empathic concern, goes further: leading us to care about them, moblizing us to help if need be. This compassionate attitude builds up bottom-up primal systems for caring and attachment deep down in the brain, those these mix with more reflective, top-down circuits that evaluate how much we value their well-being.

Our circuity for empathy was designed for face-to-face moments. Today, working together online poses special challenges for empathy. Take, for example, that familiar moment in a meeting when everyone has reached a tacit consensus, and one person then articulates aloud what everyone already knows but has not said: "Okay, then, we all agree on this." Heads nod.

But coming to such consensus in an onkine text-based discussion requires flying blinr, without relying on the continuous cascade of nonverbal messages that in a real meeting let someone announce aloud the as-yet-unspoken agreement. We can base our reading of others only on what they have to say. Beyond that, there's reading berween the lines: online werely on cognitive empathy, the variety of mind-reading that let's us infer what's going on in someone else's mind.

Interesting. I relate to emotional empathy and empathic concern over cognitive empathy.

That's because I do -although weakly- mirror other people's emotions without difficulty, it works automatically. I don't really feel it in the body though and they don't usually elicit the emotions with the same strength in me.. it's still the same emotions, just weaker. This way I'm still able to clearly think.

As for empathic concern, I'm quite helpful, though I do not do it out of actual feeling most of the time, so I'm not sure I fully qualify for this sympathy definition. So I don't know exactly what sort of mechanism ensures that I'm so helpful but I am.

Finally, about cognitive empathy.. that would be the hardest as I focus on myself by default and I do not usually try to analyse other people's attitudes or perspectives. I have succeeded before though, with people who were very clearly expressing what they felt where I also had a chance to see the reason for it.