“We’re trying to get the kids to think a little bit more introspectively about their feelings since the first step of empathy is recognizing one’s own emotions.”

"The Empathy Handbook" came out of the Educating for Democracy course, part of ASU’s Humanities Lab. The lab is supported by the Create the Change Initiative and the Cultivating Civic Virtues through Action, or CCVA, initiative, granted by the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University and funded by the Lilly Endowment Inc.

People with high levels of psychopathic tendencies are often incapable of feeling empathy for other people. From a brain science perspective, empathy isn't a single emotion but a multi-part neural process. It involves brain systems that help us share others' feelings, understand their perspectives, and even mentally step into their experience.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of healthcare, empathy remains a crucial yet often elusive attribute among professionals tasked with the care of aging populations. A groundbreaking study published in BMC Geriatrics in 2026 sheds new light on this challenge, investigating the transformative potential of a brief intervention using an aging simulation suit. This randomized controlled trial, led by Serrada-Tejeda and colleagues, explores how immersive experiential learning can enhance clinical empathy in healthcare workers who operate within long-term care settings. The findings hold profound implications for medical training and the future of geriatric care.

At the heart of this study lies an innovative approach to empathy training—deploying an aging simulation suit that physically mimics the sensory and motor impairments associated with aging.

Business schools are under growing pressure to prepare graduates who can act responsibly in a world shaped by deep social inequality and urgent environmental challenges. 

However, many educators still rely on learning strategies that prioritise cognitive understanding of social problems over emotional engagement. Students typically learn about social problems through cases, lectures and simulations, which keep human experience at a distance. 

Cognitive empathy, or the understanding of what someone is going through, can be taught through cases and simulations. Affective empathy, which is the emotional connection that makes a problem feel personally relevant, cannot. Without it, students struggle to connect deeply to social problems and to act on them.

"by Sarfaraz K. Niazi

Empathy plays a central role in healthcare delivery, where higher clinician empathy is consistently associated with improved therapeutic alliance, increased patient satisfaction, better adherence, and improved outcomes.

Empathy-focused educational and behavioral interventions have therefore been increasingly adopted in medical and allied health training programs, with systematic reviews demonstrating moderate but reliable improvements in empathic skills. Educational systems similarly acknowledge empathy as a fundamental social–emotional competency associated with mental health, academic engagement, and prosocial behavior."

The word “empathy” carries a curious linguistic history in meaning that stretches across centuries and languages. It once existed in Greek as empathia (εμπάθεια), a term associated with emotion and inner movement. Today, English uses “empathy” to describe understanding and compassion, while in Modern Greek, empathia often conveys hostility or resentment.

From emotion to excess: The ancient roots of the Greek word “empathy”

Listening is a habit—and habits aren’t fixed
Graham Bodie, professor of communications at the University of Mississippi, describes listening as a habit-based behavior. Like other habits, he says, “listening becomes ingrained through repetition, often runs below conscious awareness, and remains malleable.”

That framing matters. If listening were a fixed trait—something you “have” or “don’t have”—we’d be stuck with our defaults. But if listening operates like a habit, we can strengthen it. We can notice our filters, experiment with new choices, and adapt our listening to what the moment requires.

Listening intelligence (LQ), a framework developed by Bodie and several colleagues, invites us to build three capacities:

Summary: What makes us human? For decades, scientists have debated whether our ability to speak and our ability to understand others’ feelings (Theory of Mind) grew from the same “mental soil.” A new study has finally settled the question.

Using fMRI to scan children as young as three, researchers found that these two sophisticated skills originate from completely separate, non-overlapping brain regions. This “discrete architecture” suggests that our brains evolved with specialized wiring for language and empathy from the very beginning, rather than these skills branching off from a single cognitive source as we grow.

When empathy is integrated into healthcare innovation, it changes the way solutions are designed from the ground up. Instead of focusing solely on efficiency or performance, developers begin to consider how patients experience care in real life. A system may be highly advanced, but if it creates confusion or anxiety, its effectiveness is limited. For example, a digital health platform might offer powerful features, but if patients struggle to navigate it during stressful moments, the technology fails to achieve its purpose. Empathy helps ensure that innovation is not only intelligent but also intuitive and supportive.

DEFINING EMPATHY AND COMPASSION
Empathy and compassion are related, yet distinct constructs, each of which have multiple dimensions: affective, cognitive, behavioral, intentional, motivational, spiritual, moral, and others. In addition to their multidimensionality, compassion and empathy are crowded by multiple adjacent constrcuts with which they overlap to varying degrees, such as kindness, caring, concern, sensitvity, respect, and a host of behaviors, such as listening, accurately responding, patience and so on. 

Both compassion and empathy can be conceptualized at state and/or trait levels: people can have context-dependent experiences of empathy or compassion (i.e., state), or can have a tendency to be empathic or compassionate (i.e., trait). Compassion and empathy also appear to differ in underlying structure as well as brain function. When assessing compassion and empathy, it is often important to measure their opposites, or constructs that present barriers to experiencing and expressing compassion or empathy. 

“Compassion fatigue” is more accurately characterized as empathy fatigue, and some evidence indicates that compassion can actually counteract negative aspects of empathy.

Damage to the amygdala has been linked to impairments in empathy, typically documented as deficits in accurately identifying others’ emotional experiences, especially fear. This has led some to theorize that amygdala dysfunction is a core feature of psychopathy. There is growing evidence, however, that motivation to empathize is distinct from empathic accuracy. Moreover, anecdotal observations in patients with amygdala lesions have noted their tendencies to approach, rather than avoid, empathic encounters with strangers, even when the patients have impairments in empathic accuracy.

We conducted a novel investigation specifically examining empathy motivation in patients with amygdala damage. We used a free-choice paradigm to assess motivation to empathize.

By Daily Freeman

This inability to express or feel empathy, it turns out, is serious. It isolates the powerful into their own stereotypes and egotistical certainties, which lessens their ability to make good, or even rational, decisions. (Right, Donald?). And hubris syndrome isn’t merely psychological; it’s also physiological.

Citing neuroscience research, Useem writes: “And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, ‘mirroring,’ that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what (psychologist Dacher) Keltner has termed the ‘power paradox’: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.”

In May our theme for Mental Health & Education Week is "Feel Well, Think Well, Learn Well….Together!". When we practice empathy, we help each other feel well by creating safe and supportive spaces, think well by understanding different perspectives without judgment, and learn well…together by growing through shared experiences and mutual care.

This month, we are focusing on the theme of EMPATHY with students as part of their mental health skill-building. Empathy is the ability to understand what someone else may be experiencing by imagining how they might feel or think. It’s about “walking in another person’s shoes,” listening to their perspective without judgment, and expressing our understanding of their emotions. Empathy involves recognizing the humanity in others, being fully present, and validating their feelings. Often, it is the first step toward compassionate action and supporting others in meaningful ways.

Empathy is important because it helps us:

Treat others in the way they want to be treated

Better understand the needs and feelings of those around us

Recognize how our words and actions are perceived by others

Respond more thoughtfully to the needs and experiences of others

A new study is the first to show that two of our most sophisticated cognitive functions, using and understanding language and being able to sense how other people feel, have distinct origins in the brain in young children – matching what we know about the adult brain. 

The findings suggest that these separate but related ways of processing complex concepts, both uniquely human skills, do not originate from overlapping brain areas and grow more distinct as the mind matures, which challenges prior theories. Instead, our brains appear to have evolved with discrete architecture and wiring enabling these different kinds of thinking. 

At work, the human case for empathy is straightforward: Social connection is one of our greatest sources of well-being, and when workers feel it they grow happier and healthier. Research has now made the business case for it equally clear: Employees of empathic companies do better, working harder, collaborating more efficiently, and generating stronger ideas.

AI, however, is putting human connection at risk. Many workers, deeply concerned about how the technology will change their jobs, are experiencing rising levels of mistrust and “FOBO,” or fear of becoming obsolete. A 2025 study found that when companies adopted AI, employees’ depression levels tended to increase over time.

In the study, researchers analyzed conversations in which participants responded to emotionally charged scenarios and practiced writing empathetic replies. Some did so without any feedback, others were allowed to watch a video with suggestions from a communications expert, and others got personalized feedback from an AI coach.

The experiment involved 968 participants, producing over 2,900 conversations and over 30,000 messages exchanged. The conclusion highlighted a surprising but powerful insight:

The ability to feel empathy is different from the ability to express empathy.

Empathy is increasingly held up as the one leadership quality AI cannot replicate. The irony, then, is that new research from Stanford suggests it can be trained using AI — but doing so may produce leaders who communicate empathy without actually feeling it.

Empathy is Our Strategic Superpower
I’ve always been told empathy is a soft skill, but that’s the furthest from the truth. Empathy is our most potent strategic advantage. While the ‘half-life’of specialized technical skills1 has plummeted to just four years, foundational human strengths like ethical decision making, adaptability, and critical thinking endure.

Consider the “new work day” in HR: Sana agents can now cross-reference internal mobility data and flag flight risks, recommending a promotion and a new hire before a manager even starts their day. This creates space for leaders to have meaningful conversations about ambition and growth—the ones only humans can have.

“Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.” – Mohsin Hamid.

As conversations around mental health continue to grow, the importance of safe, supportive spaces has never been more evident.

Empathy Counselling & Psychotherapy, based in Portlaoise, has been quietly providing such a space for over two decades.

Founded by Siobhan Galvin, the practice has evolved into a team of experienced, accredited and pre-accredited psychotherapists. Located discreetly off Grattan Street, it offers a warm, comfortable, and private setting where individuals can feel at ease.

At the heart of the service is the belief that effective counselling begins with an empathic and safe relationship—built on trust, openness and understanding.

In this Pearl, Maria shares how leading with empathy can transform both student behavior and relationships within a school community. Reflecting on a challenging experience with a student, she explains how listening, building trust, and seeking the “why” behind behavior shifted her process from correction to understanding, and led to meaningful change. Her story highlights that true leadership is grounded in human connection, reminding us that “success isn't just about the standards and scores. It's about human connection.”

Allie Beth Stuckey's debate with David French shows a textbook example of toxic empathy at work.

His sit down with Allie Beth Stuckey on her podcast, “Relatable,” was civil, polite, and respectful from beginning to end. But maybe the most ironic aspect of the conversation, though, centered around their debate over “toxic empathy” – the name of Stuckey’s bestselling book, and a topic that clearly bothers David French.

According to Stuckey, “toxic empathy” is empathy that overrides truth or moral judgment and “encourages the affirmation of lies, sin, or destructive politics.” Empathy becomes harmful when it leads to someone affirming something that is harmful and wrong – especially sexual confusion.

Pressing David French on why he used the preferred pronoun “she” to describe a “he” he replied, “I don’t see the value in saying something that I know and they know is going to be hurtful to them. It’s just normal, complete politeness and manners.”