Empathic concern

Empathic concern refers to other-oriented emotions elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need. These other-oriented emotions include feelings of tenderness, sympathy, compassion, soft-heartedness, and the like.

Empathic concern is often and wrongly confused with empathy. To empathize is to respond to another's perceived emotional state by experiencing feeling of a similar sort. Empathic concern or sympathy not only include empathizing, but also entails having a positive regard or a non-fleeting concern for the other person.

C. Daniel Batson is one chief pioneer of the term. His mature definition of the term is "other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need". Batson explains this definition in the following way.

Many writers other than Batson use different terms for this construct or very similar constructs. Especially popular—perhaps more popular than 'empathic concern'—are sympathy, compassion or pity. Other terms include the tender emotion and sympathetic distress.

Human beings are strongly motivated to be connected to others. In humans and higher mammals, an impulse to care for offspring is almost certainly genetically hard-wired, although modifiable by circumstance.

At the behavioral level it is evident from the descriptions of comparative psychologists and ethologists that behaviors homologous to empathic concern can be observed in other mammalian species. Notably, a variety of reports on ape empathic reactions suggest that, apart from emotional connectedness, apes have an explicit appreciation of the other's situation. A good example is consolation, defined as reassurance behavior by an uninvolved bystander towards one of the combatants in a previous aggressive incident.

Empathic concern is thought to emerge later developmental and to require more self-control than either emotional contagion or personal distress. Developmental research indicates a broad range of social competencies children bring to their interpersonal relationships. As early as 2 years of age, they show (a) the cognitive capacity to interpret, in simple ways, the physical and psychological states of others, (b) the emotional capacity to experience, affectively, the state of others, and (c) the behavioral repertoire that permits the possibility of attempts to alleviate discomfort in others.

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