Joy, the film’s protagonist and the leader of the emotions, is set up to be easily likable, from her Tinkerbelle-esque sprightliness to her big watchful blue eyes, but given the extent of psychological grounding for the film, her behavior is not surprising.
Studies have shown that happy individuals tend to be the worst at displaying empathy. And in a twist, those same happy individuals, like Joy, believe they’re very good at expressing it.
But it’s developing empathy and compassion—specifically the kind found through experience, even the sad kind—that provides Joy the direction they need to find their way back to Headquarters.
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A year ago this month, I wrote a newsletter warning about a new trend on the MAGA Christian right. Christian theologians and influencers had begun warning about the “sin of empathy” or “toxic empathy.”....
The problem in those cases isn’t with empathy, which is a vital human virtue, but rather in its selective application. Just as we wouldn’t call love a sin because we might be stingy in our love, empathy isn’t a sin because its application is incomplete.
Or, put another way, our problem isn’t with too much empathy, but too little. We’re unwilling to place ourselves in other people’s shoes, to try to understand who they are and what their lives are like.
It’s hard to talk about this issue without recognizing a fundamental truth of the moment: The attack on empathy would have gained very little traction in the church if Donald Trump weren’t president. He delights in vengeance, and he owes his presidency to the evangelical church.
Empathy—the ability to sense another's emotions, to imagine their inner world, to feel with them—is not a decorative feature of human consciousness. It is the foundational architecture upon which relationships, communities, and civilizations are built. It is what stops a hand mid-strike, what draws us toward a stranger's tears, what compels sacrifice for unseen others. And it is facing an existential threat from the very tools designed to bring us together.
Empathy is the foundation of effective therapy, and our Postgraduate Certificate in Empathy in Therapy will equip you with the skills to deliver compassionate and informed care. By studying this course, you'll gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of human emotions and develop the ability to build strong therapeutic relationships.
With empathy at its core, this course will help you navigate the intricacies of human behavior and provide a supportive environment for clients to explore their thoughts and feelings. Upon completion, you'll be well-positioned for a career in therapy or counseling, with opportunities to work in various settings, including mental health organizations and private practice.
Empathy every day In healthcare, we can use empathy to make a positive, memorable impact on the lives of so many. Here are three ways to apply this.
Maintain awareness and perspective. Tomorrow’s procedure could be the 100th one you perform — or today’s presentation could be a monthly occurrence in your schedule — but either could be the first for your patient or colleague.
Seeing each experience through the other’s eyes and responding with compassion and understanding is crucial to the way they’ll remember each moment.
In a recent 6,000-word essay in The Atlantic, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused the Trump-led GOP of waging "MAGA's War on Empathy." However, the piece reveals more about Clinton's own misunderstanding of empathy and her tendency to weaponize it as a political cudgel against her opponents.
Why it matters
Clinton's essay exposes the moral core of today's Democratic Party, which often uses empathy as a way to shame Americans into surrendering their liberty. The piece also highlights the left's blind spot when it comes to extending empathy across political lines, as surveys show liberals struggling more than conservatives to empathize with the other side.
A new scientific study has identified a potential “hidden switch” in the brain linked to empathy, offering fresh insights into how humans understand and respond to others’ emotions. Researchers say the findings could reshape approaches to mental health, social behavior, and neurological research, while opening new pathways for therapies targeting empathy-related disorders. The discovery adds to growing evidence on the biological mechanisms behind emotional intelligence and compassion.
Empathic Technologies, their Materialities, and Affordances. Technology’s form and the ways in which it acts in practice strongly shape how it can be used in social contexts and the types of empathic interactions it enables. LLMs and XR exemplify two distinct productions of empathy, affording, respectively, empathic simulation and empathic mediation. This raises open questions for designing systems that increasingly simulate or mediate empathy:
But the most frequently invoked criticism of Krauthamer’s story was that it was an example of “suicidal empathy”—that is, a maladaptive and harmful form of the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. Empathy has been enjoying a cultural moment. You can buy sweatshirts with “EMPATHY” emblazoned on them and bumper stickers that say “Practice Radical Empathy.”
Bookstore self-help aisles are filled with titles such as Sensitive Is the New Strong and children’s books that purport to teach empathy-building skills. We are told to read more literature because it will make us more empathetic (an update of an older notion of literature’s ability to cultivate the sympathetic imagination), and even technologists are claiming they can build “empathetic AI.”
Joining Tanzina to address the empathy gap, and what it takes to more fully imagine the perspectives of others, are Jelani Cobb, a staff writer for The New Yorker who writes about race, politics, history, and culture, Ziwe Fumudoh, a comedian and writer for Showtime’s "Desus and Mero," and Javier Zamora, a poet and writer born in El Salvador, and author of the collection "Unaccompanied."
Today the American Humanist Association has opened grant applications for its inaugural year of the American Empathy Project (AEP). The Project aims to mobilize humanists across the country for a national day of service on May 2, 2026. Selected grantees will receive $1,000 from the AHA for their chosen project, along with planning support and additional project resources.
“The American Empathy Project is our response to the crisis of cruelty plaguing our country and communities,” said Fish Stark, Executive Director of the American Humanist Association. “With an administration in power that diminishes our collective humanity day by day, we knew it was incumbent upon us to put our values into action – to show up for each other where the system has failed.
In the last couple of decades, there’s been a noticeable shift towards a style of leadership that is softer and more emotionally sensitive. Plenty of evidence, both anecdotal and empirical, supports the shift: Businesses do better (because people do better) when leaders provide genuine emotional support. People have come to expect it, too. Employees who don’t feel supported are more likely to leave. According to one report, unempathetic organizations risk losing $180 billion a year in attrition costs.
You may recognize the name Allie Beth Stuckey. A popular Christian conservative podcaster, she rose to prominence in the late 2010s after launching her show, Relatable. The podcast surged in popularity in 2020, as Stuckey gained notoriety for criticizing lockdowns and the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2024, she published a New York Times bestseller, Toxic Empathy, which accused the progressive movement of exploiting Christian empathy to advance its political aims.
Today, Stuckey is one of the most prominent voices on the Christian right. And last week, Hillary Clinton took aim at her in The Atlantic, casting Stuckey as the centerpiece of the MAGA movement’s so-called “war on empathy.” It’s a forceful essay, one that exposes a deeper clash between two visions of religious morality and the role it should play in public life. That’s one of the defining debates of this moment—which is why we invited Stuckey to respond. —Jillian Lederman
Emotional well-being has become a major factor affecting workplace performance, superseding talent and technology.
Across industries, leaders are witnessing a quiet and costly reality: Disengagement, burnout and silent attrition are increasing, even among high-performance teams. In my experience, the most effective responses do not pertain to introducing new productivity tools or even incentive schemes; instead, they involve empathy that is operationalized as a leadership skill, practiced mindfully and deliberately.
Empathy has become a baseline expectation of modern leadership, but practiced without judgment it can backfire, leaving leaders depleted and employees feeling misunderstood. Effective leadership requires a more discerning approach: wise empathy, which recognizes that different emotional moments call for different responses.
Sharing in employees’ negative emotions can accelerate burnout, while responding to those with compassion and support can protect both leaders and teams. The opposite is often true for positive emotions, which benefit from shared celebration. If leaders take five steps designed to guide them in the practice of wise empathy, they can strengthen relationships, improve engagement and retention, and support others without losing their own footing
Rick Pidcock Ever since Joe Rigney released his book about empathy being a sin, the TheoBros of conservative evangelicalism have been piling into his bus, demonizing empathy for those they run over as “the greatest rhetorical tool of manipulation in the 21st century,” and as “the progressive gaze.”
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler recently climbed aboard the anti-empathy bus. It’s the latest example of Mohler’s flip-flopping.
In 2014, he said Christians should “lead with empathy.” But now Mohler claims: “I don’t think empathy is a thing. I don’t think it’s real. It is a substitute for real Christian morality.”
by Melissa Hogenboom Notably, we still typically describe traits like empathy as naturally feminine and traits like dominance and assertiveness as masculine. Even when displaying the same behaviour, men are seen as assertive and women as aggressive.
One particularly notable trait that is often gendered in this way is empathy. Women supposedly are natural empaths while men who show more empathy are typically seen as weak.
But why is that? Is it true that women are naturally more empathetic than men, or are we socialised to be?
But feminism did not just teach me empathy; it taught me clarity. It taught me that my exhaustion, which results from a continued state of empathy without any foreseeable end, is not a personal failure; it is structural. It is structural because the system is designed to rely on women’s unpaid emotional labor while denying them power, rest, and reciprocity. It normalizes overgiving as virtue and resilience as obligation, ensuring that burnout is individualized while inequality remains intact. The fatigue is produced by institutions, cultures, and relationships that extract care without accountability, reward, or meaningful change.
Anger is not a betrayal of feminism. It is what comes after understanding has been stretched too far. It is the moment when empathy stops being generous and starts being exploited. This anger is clear, not chaotic. It knows exactly who benefits when women stay calm, quiet, and endlessly patient.
Empathy toward patients is an essential skill for a physician to deliver the best care for any patient. Empathy also protects the physician from moral injury and decreases the chances for malpractice litigations. The current graduate medical education curriculum allows trainees to graduate without getting focused training to develop empathy as a core competency domain. The tools to measure empathy inherently lack validity.
The accurate measure of the provider’s empathy comes from the patient’s perspectives of their experience and their feedback, which is rarely reaching the trainee. The hidden curriculum in residency programs gives mixed messages to trainees due to inadequate role modeling by attending physicians. This narrative style manuscript portrays a teachable moment at the bedside vividly. The teaching team together reflected upon the lack of empathy, took steps to resolve the issue.
The attending demonstrated role modeling as an authentic and impactful technique to teach empathy. The conclusion includes a proposal to include the patient’s real-time feedback to trainees as an essential domain under Graduate Medical Education core competencies of professionalism and patient care.
Empathy, Peter emphasized, is not only about customers – it is also about how teams work together. High-performing, creative teams depend on psychological safety: environments where people feel safe to experiment, learn and contribute.
As a leader, Peter believes that unlocking the creative potential of others is one of the most important responsibilities. Diverse teams, iterative thinking and learning by doing are essential to innovation – especially in complex, safety-critical domains such as healthcare.
Using several frameworks for measuring empathic communication, the researchers found that LLMs were nearly as good at recognizing empathy as experts—and far more reliable than nonexperts.
The team, which includes first author Aakriti Kumar, Nalin Poungpeth, and Bruce Lambert of Northwestern, Diyi Yang of Stanford, and Erina Farrell of Penn State, also found that evaluating AI models in this way could potentially teach humans something new about empathy—both how we measure it and how we apply it.
“Studying how experts and AI evaluate empathic communication forces us to be precise about what effective empathic responses look like in practice,” says Kumar, a postdoctoral researcher at Kellogg and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). “If we can break empathy down into reliable components, we can give humans and AI clearer feedback on how to make others feel heard and understood.”
A functioning democracy is a practical political application of empathy: it demands the willingness to consider the opposition’s needs and perspectives, and it expects that our leaders will arrive at a policy decision through reasoned debate and compromise when necessary. When disadvantaged groups demand “a seat at the table,” it is not because they expect to necessarily win, but they expect that they will be heard and listened to.
The American Humanist Association is awarding 100 grants of ~$1,000 each to changemakers across the country who will mobilize their communities with service projects as part of the American Empathy Project on Saturday, May 2, 2026. This national day of action will show that empathy is stronger than cruelty and create a ripple effect of compassion and community care.
We'll supply the funds, provide project guides, and offer planning and promotional support — empowering YOU to put empathy into action in YOUR community. Join us!
Each year, the American Humanist Association presents the Humanist of the Year Award to honor individuals whose work reflects the very best of humanist values. Past honorees have included Kurt Vonnegut, Jonas Salk, Betty Friedan, and Carl Rogers.
At our 84th Annual Conference, we are proud to recognize Dr. Jelani Cobb — journalist, historian, educator, and Dean of Columbia Journalism School — for his groundbreaking work exploring race, democracy, and justice in America.
In this moving ceremony, Dr. Cobb accepts the award and shares powerful reflections on morality, empathy, democracy, and the urgent need for truth in our times.
👉 Learn more and join the movement: americanhumanist.org
Empathy is widely celebrated in our public life. We are told it should guide our politics, shape our policies, and soften our judgments. To lack empathy is considered a moral failure; to appeal to it is often enough to settle an argument. Increasingly, empathy is not treated merely as a virtue, but as the highest moral authority — one before which all other considerations are expected to bow.
Empathy itself is not the enemy. Properly understood, it is a gift from God. Scripture calls us to “weep with them that weep” (Romans 12:15) and to bear one another’s burdens. A hard-hearted people is a dangerous people.
by Paul J. Batura It’s not too often that you see former First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey in the same story — but that’s exactly what happened last week.
Writing in the Atlantic, Mrs. Clinton called out Mrs. Stuckey for her use of the term “toxic empathy” — which is also the name of the social conservative’s bestselling book. In the context of the magazine article, though, the former Secretary of State was incredulous that a Christian could string those two words together.
“Toxic empathy!” Clinton wrote. “What an oxymoron. I don’t know if the phrase reflects moral blindness or moral bankruptcy, but either way it’s appalling.”
Mrs. Clinton’s comments certainly reflect her worldview.
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