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: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another No novelist working today has Strout's extraordinary capacity for radical empathy, for seeing the essence of people beyond reductive categories, for uniting us without sentimentality.—Pricilla Gilman Seen from the protagonists' worldview, the film becomes an earnest call for empathy in a country that is witnessing an unprecedented influx of immigrants.—Emiliano Granada also : the capacity for this a person who lacks empathy We often think of empathy—people's ability to share and understand each other's experiences—as a hard-wired trait, but it's actually more like a skill. The right experiences, habits and practices can increase our empathic capacity … —Jamil Zaki2
: the act of imagining one's ideas, feelings, or attitudes as fully inhabiting something observed (such as a work of art or natural occurrence) : the imaginative projection (see projection sense 6b) of a subjective (see subjective entry 1 sense 3a) state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it At the time the term was coined, empathy was not primarily a means to feel another person's emotion, but the very opposite: To have empathy, in the early 1900s, was to enliven an object, or to project one's own imagined feelings onto the world. Some of the earliest psychology experiments on empathy focused on … a bodily feeling or movement that produced a sense of merging with an object. One subject imagining a bunch of grapes felt "a cool, juicy feeling all over." The arts critics of the 1920s claimed that with empathy, audience members could feel as if they were carrying out the abstract movements of new modern dance.—Susan Lanzoni Last Updated: 1 May 2025 - Updated example sentencesSubscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free!
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