Empathy is one of four values that the institute has identified as exemplified by Raoul Wallenberg, and upon which the Wallenberg Institute is built, along with tolerance, courage, and leadership. Respectful and informed communication across differences, said Veidlinger, plays a crucial role in building empathy and is central to the institute’s mission of continuing Raoul Wallenberg’s legacy by combating discrimination, antisemitism, and divisiveness.

The Center for Empathy and Technology (TECH Center) promotes empathy and compassion in the development and applications of rapidly emerging health innovations. Our programming advances best practices at the intersection of empathy, compassion, and healthcare technology in an effort to support shared learning opportunities with health professional trainees, K-12 students, and community partners.  

The Center is dedicated to understanding how emerging technologies promote or undermine empathy, compassion, and wellbeing. Through our research, education, and community engagement initiatives, we seek to fulfill our center mission and to provide leadership on the empathic design and use of new health innovations.

. Empathy begins with attentiveness.
Anxiety grows in the silence. It thrives when we stop listening to one another, when leaders pull back, and when compassion gives way to fatigue.

The first act of empathy is simple, though not always easy: Pay attention. Listen deeply enough to hear the need beneath the noise. Notice the fear behind someone’s frustration, or the exhaustion behind their anger. Ask what people need, don’t just assume you know what they need.

by Jamil Zaki and Conny Kalcher

  Most companies fail to deliver the empathy customers want, and that failure is costing them loyalty and growth. A global survey of nearly 12,000 consumers across 11 countries found that empathy—customers’ sense that a company understands and...more

Empathy was once considered too soft and squishy for the world of work, but decades of research have shattered that myth. Empathy includes three pieces: sharing others’ experiences, trying to understand their version of the world, and caring for their well-being. When people express empathy, they build deeper, more nourishing relationships. When they receive it, their trust, morale, and happiness rise.

Urging us to turn away from voices perpetuating harmful stereotypes, gender equality advocate Gary Barker shares three insights on fostering a culture of care, compassion and connection among men. "We are the most wired-to-care species on the planet," he says. "But if you don't use it ... you don't get good at it."

Young adults face a rising tide of mental illness and loneliness. We propose that an overlooked barrier for social connection is how people perceive each other’s empathy. Here, our longitudinal study of an undergraduate student community (N = 5,192) reveals that undergraduates who perceive their peers as empathic report better current and future well-being.

Yet we document an ‘empathy perception gap’: people systematically see others as less empathic than others see themselves. Students who perceived their peers as less empathic were less willing to take social risks and grew more isolated over time. To disrupt this cycle, we conducted two field experiments that presented students with data on their peers’ self-reported empathy and behavioural nudges to encourage social risk taking.

These interventions reduced the empathy perception gap, increased social behaviours and expanded social networks months later. This work offers a promising, scalable strategy to cultivate social well-being, simply by presenting people with data about each other.

In an era where mental health challenges are spiking among executives and workplace toxicity is on the rise, building empathy has emerged as a critical competency—not just a feel-good initiative. Recent research reveals that empathy is neither fixed nor optional: it’s a learnable skill that can transform organizational culture, reduce bias, and drive measurable business outcomes. Yet despite its proven value, significant gaps persist between the empathy employees want and the empathy they actually experience.

The Empathy Paradox: Rising Awareness, Struggling Execution

Jeremy Howick, University of Leicester  – Artificial intelligence has mastered chess, art and medical diagnosis. Now it’s apparently beating doctors at something we thought was uniquely human: empathy.

A recent review published in the British Medical Bulletin analysed 15 studies comparing AI-written responses with those from human healthcare professionals. Blinded researchers then rated these responses for empathy using validated assessment tools. The results were startling: AI responses were rated as more empathic in 13 out of 15 studies – 87% of the time.

Before we surrender healthcare’s human touch to our new robot overlords, we need to examine what’s really happening here.

Our  theme for November is on The Foundational Practice of the Empathy Movement.

Join this Summit if you are ready to roll up your sleeves and help build the Movement. The Empathy Movement is a transformative force in addressing the growing fragmentation and polarization in modern societies. At its core, the movement seeks to reorient how individuals and groups relate to one another, shifting from transactional, adversarial and authoritarian interactions to ones rooted in mutual listening, deep dialogue, understanding, constructive collaboration and seeing our shared humanity.

The fifth session of “Psychology Talks with Prof. Nevzat Tarhan” was organized by Üsküdar University’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Psychology, together with the Psychology Club and Positive Psychology Club. During the event, which drew great interest from participants, Psychiatrist Prof. Nevzat Tarhan shared thought-provoking insights on narcissism, self-balance, empathy, hope, and the role of social sciences.

He stated that a lack of empathy lies at the core of narcissistic personality traits and emphasized that people mature as they redirect their love from themselves toward others. Tarhan pointed out that the cooperation between reason and emotion helps maintain balance in decision-making and drew attention to Generation Z’s search for meaning. He stressed that empathy is the key to both individual and collective healing and underlined the importance of hope and balance.

Empathy is the most undervalued KPI in business.

We track clicks, conversions and churn, but not the emotional intelligence that drives them. And today, as businesses rush to capture AI’s productivity dividend, automating decisions, speeding responses, optimising every interaction, the risk is that we erode the very human understanding that makes those interactions meaningful.

But there’s a bigger opportunity too: to use this moment to rewire the interface between brands and consumers. To build systems that are not just faster and cheaper, but more attuned, more responsive, more empathetic. Systems that are engineered to understand and respond to human emotions, needs and context, making interactions feel more natural and respectful. Offering a kind of functional empathy that picks up on cues like tone or intent and shapes outcomes that are timely, relevant, and personal.

Where AI shined stood out for empathy
Across nine separate studies spanning cancer care, thyroid disease, mental health, autism, and general medical questions, ChatGPT-4 routinely outscored licensed clinicians. 

On thyroid surgery questions, the AI’s empathy ratings sat 1.42 standard deviations above human surgeons. On mental health queries, 0.97 standard deviations higher than credentialed professionals.

When responding to patient complaints routed through hospital departments, the gap widened dramatically: 2.08 standard deviations in favor of the AI over patient-relations staff.

This study aimed to examine the relationship between pet attachment and social support, as well as the chain mediating role of emotion regulation and empathy in a sample of young adult cat owners. A total of 319 participants completed the Lexington Attachment to Pets Scale (LAPS), Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), The Chinese Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI-C) and The Perceived Social Support Scale (PSSS). The results indicated that

(1) Pet attachment, reappraisal in emotion regulation, empathy and social support are positively correlated with one another;

(2) Pet attachment not only has a direct effect on social support among young adults, but also influences it indirectly through three pathways: the mediating role of reappraisal, the mediating role of empathy, and a chain mediating role involving both reappraisal and empathy.

These findings provide a theoretical foundation for the common phenomenon of young adults keeping pet cats, reveal the psychological mechanism by which pet attachment influences social support, extend attachment theory, and enrich research on pet attachment and social support.

Creative Empathy: A Relatively New Concept
What is creative empathy? The term involves creating a relevant, appropriate, and new mental representation of someone else’s emotional and mental state.

The researchers argue that traditional psychological research has often neglected the various paths people might take to understand others’ minds. They also noted that empathizing involves an open-ended and creative process of constructing mental states and responses.

What Empathy Is and Why It’s Important

Empathy has become a popular topic in recent years, and over 1,500 books on Amazon have empathy in their title or subtitle. And for good reason. As trauma expert Bruce Perry said in his book, Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential—and Endangered, “Empathy underlies virtually everything that makes society work—like trust, altruism, collaboration, love, charity. Failure to empathize is a key part of most social problems—crime, violence, war, racism, child abuse, and inequity, to name just a few.”

Empathy is an umbrella term, which broadly involves sensitivity to others’ feelings. Psychologists distinguish between two types:

As the founder of the UK’s first empathy centre, focused on improving healthcare outcomes through greater understanding of patient perspectives, I am keen to seek out international best practice in this area. 

What started as a conversation with a colleague about working with the other empathy specialists around the world has transformed, two years later, into a global network of 13 centres across five continents.

The Global Empathy in Healthcare network has established a model for implementing empathy into healthcare worldwide – and from 2027 will be implementing a World Empathy in Healthcare Day. This enables our team at the Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare and our partners around the world to develop teaching and training in line with the latest global insights. 

Empathy as our superpower can motivate us to push back against the chaos and casual cruelty that seems to be our new reality. But even more important is the deep empathy that will be needed to create not just a durable democracy, but one that can provide the basic necessities of life for all of us.

— In a time when our society seems more polarized and fractured than ever, community religious leaders are preaching for empathy and understanding as their flocks crave civil discourse.

Care for the vulnerable, the inherent dignity of all people and prioritizing the common good over individual interests are among the common principles religious leaders cited as themes in their messages for uniting fractured communities.

The burnout crisis makes this worse. Globally, at least a third of GPs report burnout – exceeding 60% in some specialties. Burned-out doctors struggle to maintain empathy. It’s not a moral failing; it’s a physiological reality. Chronic stress depletes the emotional reserves required for genuine empathy.

The wonder isn’t that AI appears more empathic; it’s that human healthcare professionals manage any empathy at all.

Empathy Is a Leadership Skill—Not a Soft Skill

Empathy isn’t just a “nice-to-have” in leadership—it’s essential. In today’s workplaces, leaders aren’t just managing workloads; they’re managing emotions, motivation, and human connection. Empathy is what makes leadership relational, not just transactional. Psychology, as a scientific field, studies how empathy operates in human beings, highlighting its importance as a universal trait among human beings.