Posted on January 11, 2025

Psychologist Paul Ekman, best known for his pioneering work on facial expressions in relation to emotion, delineated the three main types of empathy.

Cognitive empathy refers to intellectually understanding what or how a person is feeling. For example, you see someone’s bag of groceries break on their way back to their car from the store, with everything spilling onto the parking lot, and you quickly ascertain that they likely feel embarrassed and frustrated. Cognitive empathy falls under the same umbrella as perspective-taking, or the ability to see something from someone else’s point of view.

Emotional empathy refers to actually sharing the emotions that someone else is going through. So, you see the person’s groceries fall, and you yourself feel a sense of frustration and embarrassment. Additionally, you feel a level of distress that the person is having this unfortunate experience. This is sometimes called “affective empathy.”

Compassionate empathy refers to not just understanding and experiencing someone else’s pain, but seeking to improve the person’s situation to lessen their negative feelings. I.e., you desire to help that person pick up their groceries, and offer them one of the reusable bags you brought to the store. Compassionate empathy is also called “empathic concern.”

These three types of empathy are available in different people to different degrees. Someone may be very good at cognitive empathy but not at emotional. Someone else may have no trouble feeling what another person is feeling (emotional empathy), but less of an inclination to take action to alleviate their suffering (compassionate empathy).

Certain situations may not call for all three. If you find yourself enraged at a friend for their take on a social issue, it may be helpful to activate your cognitive empathy so you intellectually understand how their circumstances influence their choices. When a natural disaster or tragedy occurs, it may be most beneficial to invoke your empathic concern.

“Ekman calls compassionate empathy a skill, the acquired knowledge ‘that we’re all connected,’” psychologist Daniel Goleman wrote for Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. “This can lead to outbursts of what he calls ‘constructive anger.’ In other words, reacting negatively to injustice or suffering can motivate us to work with others to make the world a better place.”