🪷 What Kind of Empath Are You?
Disentangling the most helpful and most paralyzing subcomponents of empathy
We usually think of empathy as a single positive character trait associated with healthy social behavior. But in reality, there are multiple subcomponents hiding beneath the surface that affect how we express our empathy.
Three widely acknowledged subcomponents include:
Empathic concern: feeling warmth and compassion toward a person who is suffering
Perspective-taking: imagining a painful experience from the point of view of a person who is suffering
Personal distress: directly experiencing suffering as a result of seeing another person suffer
These components may produce different emotional experiences and stimulate different kinds of behavior. Studying how they make people feel and how they impact social interaction is important for understanding our sense of humanity. We want to effectively encourage the right kind of empathy across society.
Fortunately, a study published just last week is providing new insights into exactly this challenge.
🛟 What types of empathy are most beneficial to humanity?
In a study published in January 2025, researchers recruited 77 participants and used surveys to measure their empathic tendencies. They also assessed how often each participant helped other people in their daily life.
Survey questions broke empathy down into subcomponents by using specific items related to each construct. Here are example items for each subcomponent:
Empathic concern: “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me”
Perspective-taking: “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective”
Personal distress: “When I see someone who badly needs help in an emergency, I go to pieces”
After the empathy surveys, each participant watched a video of someone sharing an emotional story about their life such as a relationship breakup or stressful event at work. Participants were asked to rate how much they felt specific positive and negative emotions as they watched the video.
So how did each empathy component link up with people’s emotions and helping behaviors?
Participants with high empathic concern and perspective-taking experienced more positive emotions when watching the video, while people with high personal distress experienced significantly more negative emotions. Although all three constructs are related to feelings of empathy, they elicited completely contrasting emotional responses.
Higher empathic concern and perspective-taking also correlated with more frequent reports of helping other people in daily life. There was no such association found for the personal distress component.
The negative feelings associated with personal distress are likely related to “affective mirroring”. When we see other people suffering, it’s natural to mirror those feelings and feel similarly distressed. Since emotional expressions are social signals, we often interpret other people’s stress or fear as a reason for us to worry too.
In contrast, empathic concern and perspective-taking create feelings of warmth and compassion, which have a positive rather than negative quality and encourage supportive action. While negative feelings are more likely to lead to withdrawal and paralysis, positive feelings are more likely to inspire an active desire to help.
⭐️ Takeaway tips
#1. Cultivate empathic concern and perspective-taking
The subcomponents of empathy most linked to positive emotions and helping behaviors are empathic concern and perspective-taking. When you see others in pain, try to respond with a sense of compassion for their predicament. Many of our social behaviors frequently involve some type of mirroring, but in the context of empathy, it’s more helpful to understand what the person is going through and react with friendly warmth.
#2. Don’t let personal distress take over
The least helpful subcomponent of empathy is personal distress. It’s perfectly natural to feel distressed when seeing another person suffer through pain, but this merely serves to double the amount of suffering in life. Try to think less about the negative emotional quality of what’s happening and more about how you can help a suffering person reach a more positive state of mind.
#3. Practice small acts of kindness
When others are suffering, the best thing we can do is find a way to support them and alleviate their pain. This might be as simple as heading to a store to pick up medication or just staying with them as a supportive pillar they can lean on. By practicing small acts of kindness in daily life, we can strengthen our compassionate instincts. When others are in trouble, we may then be more resilient to falling into a trap of our own suffering through affective mirroring.
“In the chemistry of man's soul, almost all noble attributes — courage, honor, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, etc. — can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.”
~ Eric Hoffer