“The connection to the emotions of others, which I call empathy, for example, is very developed in the mammals, but there are now studies on birds, and I'm actually involved in a study on fish believe it or not,” says de Waal,
“Consolation behavior as I call it, which chimpanzees do — let’s say someone is distressed and they go over to that individual and they embrace and kiss. Consolation has now been documented in many species. And anyone who has a dog probably has experience with it also.”
De Waal struggles to understand why people don’t think animals are smart.
In this study we critically examine the phenomenological foundations of intuitive diagnosis in Psychiatry by integrating Max Scheler's concept of emotional contagion with Edith Stein's three-stage model of empathy. We argue that what Scheler calls emotional contagion offers a useful pre-reflective, bodily-affective resonance that precedes and facilitates deeper empathic understanding of the subject's experience. Then, we suggest that Stein's analysis of empathy, which is based on a three-step process – i.e., the emergence of the other's experience, its imaginative explication, and the final comprehensive objectification – may account for the role of imaginative empathic immersion in diagnostic assessment.
Empathy has become a business competency, not a soft nice-to-have. With hybrid teams, rapid AI adoption, and a workforce increasingly vocal about identity and inclusion, companies are being pushed to rethink what effective leadership looks like right now. Research and workplace trend reports consistently show that employees who feel seen and supported are more engaged and more likely to stay—raising the stakes for leaders who are hiring, managing, and shaping culture in real time.
What does empathetic marketing really look like in practice—not just as a buzzword, but as a way of working and leading?
Cillian Murphy is a patron of the Unesco Child and Family Research Centre at University of Galway and a supporter of the empathy education initiatives.
The ‘Activating Social Empathy’ schools programme is supported by the Irish American Partnership and Lifes2good Foundation, and partners of the Unesco Child and Family Research Centre, Foróige and Penn State.
Dr Charlotte Silke, lead researcher with Unesco Child and Family Research Centre, said: “The core aim is to support young people in becoming more attuned to the feelings and perspectives of others, and more confident in expressing empathy across a variety of real-world contexts.”
A closer look at the research on empathy and gender reveals a more nuanced story shaped by socialization and stereotypes rather than biology.
Women report that they are more empathic on questionnaires.
Physiological and behavioral indicators show minimal or no gender differences in empathy.
Women’s modest advantage in emotion recognition reflects socialization and stereotype cues more than biology.
Stereotypes create unfair expectations for women and discourage men from adopting caring roles.
If you ask people who’s more empathic, men or women, you’ll probably hear a confident answer. Cultural narratives, from everyday conversation to the statements of public figures like the Dalai Lama, often portray empathy as something women naturally possess in greater supply.
At a time when social trust feels increasingly fragile, leadership grounded in integrity, empathy, and consistency is critical. This webinar features leaders who have successfully built trust by prioritizing “learning from listening” and centering empathetic communication within their communities.
Join us for a conversation with leaders who are putting trust into practice. We’ll explore how they’ve built strong, credible reputations; how they foster trust at both individual and community levels; what larger institutions can learn from these grassroots strategies; and how locally grounded approaches can be adapted to strengthen trust at scale.
Moderator: Pearce Godwin, Founder, Listen First Project & Listen First Coalition; Senior Director, Urban Rural Action
Enter Empathetic AI Policy Empathetic AI Policy—the emerging discipline that insists human impact must be designed, measured, and governed as rigorously as performance—exists precisely because of these failures. It’s not about making machines emotional, but about making human decision-makers accountable. It means recognizing that every model has moral weight, every dataset represents real lives, and every automated decision carries consequences that ripple through families, institutions, and society. In short, empathy is not a soft constraint—it’s the structure that keeps AI aligned with humanity.
The irony of modern AI is that it often reflects the very flaws it was meant to transcend: bias, carelessness, and moral blindness. The industry’s most infamous collapses—from racist chatbots to wrongful prosecutions and mass surveillance—share a single root cause: empathy was ignored, underestimated, or engineered out of the process. These are not merely “bugs in the system.” They are symptoms of a worldview that treats technology as neutral, when in reality, it always encodes human priorities.
Education today stands at a crossroads. As artificial intelligence transforms how we learn and live, the very essence of education is being reimagined. Are we preparing young people merely to compete, or to connect? To master technology, or to master themselves?
Educators and policymakers everywhere are rediscovering a timeless truth: intelligence opens doors, but empathy keeps them open. Emotional intelligence, the ability to understand and manage emotions, to lead with compassion, and to act with integrity is emerging as the most critical skill of the 21st century. It bridges knowledge and wisdom, between information and understanding, between success and significance.
This paper introduces the Selective Empathy Theory, a new theoretical framework that challenges the idealized, universalist understanding of empathy in psychology and social discourse. Contrary to the prevailing notion of empathy as an automatic and morally virtuous emotional response, this theory argues that affective empathy operates selectively—shaped and constrained by the perceiver’s moral frames, group identity, and socio-cultural context.
Through interdisciplinary case studies spanning literature, film, political polarization, and digital discourse, the paper illustrates how empathy is not universally distributed but strategically directed toward those who align with one’s values and identity. The model emphasizes that selective empathy is not a moral failure, but a structural feature of emotional cognition, with profound implications for affective politics, media influence, and public morality.
Research has revealed that with increasing power comes decreasing likelihood of empathy.
This is an inherent human bias, so it is a true blind spot. Leaders who fail to take other peoples' perspectives are at a disadvantage.
Try the strategies described here to work around the power-empathy bias.
Have you ever noticed someone in power who seems rather indifferent to the opinions of others? Perhaps you’ve witnessed a leader who doesn’t seem tuned in to the experiences of the people they lead.
by Alison Jane Martingano Research shows that empathy training programs can increase empathy.
Empathy training programs that include practice and feedback tend to be most effective.
Experiences such as travel, learning sign language, and pet ownership may also train empathy.
There are no empathy "quick fixes." Improvements require effort and practice.
Many people treat empathy the way they treat height or eye color; in other words, as something baked in from birth. We hear this in everyday phrases like “she’s such a good kid” or “he’s just not very sensitive,” as if empathy were an inborn trait rather than something shaped over time. In our survey, more than a third of respondents were skeptical that empathy could be improved. Yet decades of research across psychology, education, and neuroscience tell a very different story. Empathy, it turns out, is more like your biceps than your hair color. Sure, you're born with them, but their size and strength are a result of hard work.
The Empathic AI Challenge Your shifting emotional states are fundamental to how you live and engage with the world. They are influenced by—and in turn apply influence to—your behavior, decisions, thoughts, and relationships. Thus, any technology you encounter that can predict mood or simulate emotion has the potential to impinge on the outcomes of your life and the lives of those around you.
The development of an ethics standard for empathic AI is an exploration into uncharted territory. The underlying science of affect and emotion remains controversial, with disagreement on some of the most fundamental aspects, such as what an emotion is in the first place. What’s more, the technical field of affective computing, emotion recognition, and empathic AI – the world has yet to agree on a name for it – is relatively new and changing fast. On top of that, the alignment of standardization and ethics is itself a nascent and knotty challenge.
Artificial Intelligence is rapidly reshaping human experiences & in 2025 it is no longer limited to efficiency or automation - it is becoming a tool for building deeper connections.
But technology without empathy risks alienating people, making interactions transactional instead of meaningful. The true test of innovation lies in how well AI can understand, respect & respond to human emotions.
Designing humane technology means aligning intelligence with compassion, ensuring AI supports not only productivity but also human well-being. But as AI grows smarter, faster & more efficient, a deeper question arises - Can AI be empathetic?
Many people assume empathy is too soft, too subjective, or too deeply personal to quantify. In our own survey, nearly half of the respondents agreed that “it is impossible to measure empathy.” This sentiment echoes a familiar cultural belief: that empathy is like love, beautiful precisely because it resists dissection. As one commentator put it, attempts to measure empathy require “stripping it of softness, feelings, and any sense that it’s a touchy-feely-can’t-exactly-measure-it” quality. And if you strip that away, she argued, “it’s no longer empathy.”
Empathy enables innovation, inclusion and the next-generation workforce Innovation flourishes when diverse perspectives are valued and a culture of psychological safety is present. Most organizations today are composed of culturally diverse teams, each with distinct communication styles and perspectives on the world. Leaders who adapt their approach to meet the needs of different people open doors to authentic dialogue and deeper understanding.
Empathizing with another is perhaps the most human emotion of all and a long shot from the cold calculations of vectorized tokens that drive the inner workings of contemporary LLMs. This chapter looks beyond the questions of what to make of AI-generated “empathy” and instead asks whether AI can be used to develop our capacities for genuine human empathy.
Empathy is not a static trait, instead capable of growth and development, and this paper explores whether AI can and, more importantly, should be used to increase one’s empathy. Nothing in principle stands in the way of AI improving our empathy, but the possibility raises unanswered questions about whether such an approach would be effective or would backfire in unexpected ways, such as encouraging the commodification of empathy as a technological tool that can make companies money, rather than a fundamental part of the human experience.
Empathy Isn’t the Problem - Enmeshment Is What the author called “empathy” is something very different, something psychologist Murray Bowen described decades ago as enmeshment.
Enmeshment is the emotional fusion that happens when two people lose sight of where one person’s emotional life ends and the other’s begins. It’s not connection—it’s collapse. The self collapses into the other. Boundaries disappear. The relationship starts operating from a rigid, unhealthy script: one person must feel a certain way, act a certain way, uphold a certain emotional role—for the sake of the other.
In a world that feels sharper and more self-centered than ever, empathy seems to be disappearing, especially online. Political turbulence, social media culture, and a growing focus on self-preservation have created an environment where kindness is scarce, and disagreement feels like a battle. I explore how this leads to nonproductive arguing, and why practicing empathy, even in small ways, is more important than ever.
I can’t be the only one who’s noticed that the world feels a little meaner now than it did four or five years ago. Scrolling through the comment section of any news article feels like entering a battlefield of opposing opinions and people trying to one-up each other with the harshest take — a place where empathy rarely survives. Anyone who’s as chronically online as me has probably noticed how contrasting this feels compared to the online climate of 2020, when there seemed to be more openness and tolerance. Now, everyone feels more narcissistic, and it makes me wonder: What happened to empathy? Especially among young people?
1. BRIDGE THE CULTURES—DON’T BULLDOZE THEM The first step was recognizing that we were merging two strong cultures, not replacing one with another. We approached it with humility and respect for the expertise already on the factory floor. We listened, observed, and spent time in each other’s spaces—our HQ team getting hands-on experience in the manufacturing environment, and our manufacturing team visiting HQ to see the broader mission in action.
That physical time together mattered. Culture isn’t built over Zoom; it’s built through shared meals, laughter, and the simple act of showing up.
Zero-positive empathy, according to Simon Baron-Cohen, is a structured empathy rooted in rules, not resonance. For autistic people, this framing has been both validating and limiting. Some have embraced the idea, finding clarity in the distinction between emotional intuition and ethical principle. Others feel flattened by it: misread, misunderstood, miscast. Many autistic individuals experience a deep, often overwhelming emotional attunement that defies diagnostic expectations.
Empathy is essential in healthcare, allowing clinicians to communicate successfully with patients and understand their needs, and research has linked clinician empathy with higher patient satisfaction, better health outcomes, and fewer medical errors. Unfortunately, studies also show that empathy tends to decrease during medical school, as fact-based learning and high-stakes testing drive students’ attention away from patients’ subjective experiences. “You’re just in survival mode,” explains Riham Alieldin, a physician and medical educator at the University of Rochester.
AI is changing healthcare and potentially even how humans interpret empathy. The motivation for this research is to evaluate whether and, if applicable, to what extent AI can show elements of empathy. While some may consider AI never genuinely empathetic, the goal is to know when AI expressions of empathy are productive versus harmful (Inzlicht et al. 2024)
Differences in perspective make defining empathy especially challenging. Empathy in healthcare is becoming a more significant focus, with related metrics like quality of care, patient-centered care, and patient satisfaction as core objectives. The paper explores whether chatbots can help bridge the gap in defining and offering empathy while reimagining care for a digital future.
Can artificial intelligence offer mental health support without compromising the uniquely human traits of empathy and understanding? This is the question that drives Zainab Iftikhar, a Brown University Ph.D. student known for combining technological innovation with deep compassion. Her journey merges psychology and computer science, aiming to answer one of the most pressing questions of our time: can AI enhance mental health care without replacing the irreplaceable?
A Journey Bridging Psychology and Technology Growing up in Pakistan, Iftikhar’s curiosity about how people connect led her to study computer science at the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences in Lahore. Her early career spanned software engineering roles in renewable energy and research at a top management sciences university. This distinctive blend of experience inspired her to pursue technology-driven solutions for psychological well-being.
Special thanks to our speakers Gregory Depow, María Monroy, and Judith Kotiuga as well as our guest moderators Patty Van Cappellen and Kunalan Manokara for sharing their expertise with our community.
0:00 Introduction to The Love Consortium 5:30 Gregory Depow, University of California San Diego, “Receiving empathy and perceived partner responsiveness” 23:58 María Monroy, Yale University, “Affective correlates of empathy” 42:00 Judith Kotiuga, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, “Empathic accuracy in couples” 1:00:20 Group Discussion with Patty Van Kappellen and Kunalan Manokara
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