Two empathies, two costs
Understanding what the other is going through and feeling it with them are two distinct operations. One supports action, the other exhausts.
One word for several things
The term empathy is recent: it was coined in English in 1909 by Edward Titchener, to translate a German word from the theory of art. It has since absorbed very different operations, which explains the confusion of its ordinary use.
Research distinguishes at a minimum an affective empathy, which consists in feeling something of the other's state, and a cognitive empathy, which consists in representing it without necessarily sharing it. The two do not systematically go together.
A questionnaire that does not add up
The most used instrument, published by Mark Davis in 1980, comprises four subscales: perspective taking, concern for others, personal distress and the tendency to identify with fictional characters.
The remarkable point is that personal distress behaves in the opposite way to the others: it predicts avoidance rather than helping. A global empathy score, obtained by adding these scales, would therefore mix a disposition to help with a disposition to flee.
Suffering with, or wanting to help
The work of Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki distinguishes two responses to another's suffering. Empathic distress consists in sharing the painful state; it comes with negative affect and pushes towards self-protection, and therefore withdrawal. Compassion consists in feeling concerned and turned towards helping; it comes with positive affect and supports action.
Their training protocols report different profiles of brain activation depending on the response mobilised. This work involves small numbers and requires confirmation, but the distinction it formalises matches what exposed professions report.
The phrase compassion fatigue
The world of care has used since the 1990s the phrase compassion fatigue to designate the exhaustion of professionals durably exposed to the distress of others. If the preceding analysis is right, the phrase designates exactly the opposite of what it names: it is not compassion that wears people down, it is shared distress.
The issue is not terminological. Depending on the mechanism at work, the organisational response differs: reducing the exposure, or working on the way it is experienced.
Neither virtue nor flaw
A strong permeability to others' states gives a quality of presence that distance does not offer, and it costs in availability. A stable distance allows one to act where resonance paralyses, and it is regularly taken for coldness.
Neither position is a level. What research allows us to say is narrower: an extreme and invariable position has a price, at one end fatigue, at the other the distance perceived by those who wanted above all to be understood.
Key points
Affective empathy and cognitive empathy are two distinct operations, which do not necessarily go together.
Personal distress predicts avoidance: adding up the empathy subscales makes no sense.
The distinction between empathic distress and compassion throws light on the exhaustion of exposed professions.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
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