Empathy and Compassion: The Science Behind Emotions

In 2025, the Muhammad Ali Center published a report on empathy in the United States that revealed that 61 percent of more than 5,000 people surveyed between 2020 and 2024 said they had noticed a decline in empathy in America (Muhammad Ali Center, 2025). The majority of us seem to see wider gaps and taller walls between groups in our world.

Terms sympathy and sympathy They are often used interchangeably, as if they mean the same thing. Empathy and compassion are similar in meaning, but they are not interchangeable. Empathy is feeling what another person feels, that is, putting yourself in that person’s position and feeling what they feel. Empathy can be the first step toward empathy; Motivation to do something about what another person feels, to help that person solve their problems. You can think of empathy as a trigger for empathy. Usually, we feel sympathy for someone who is having difficulty and then we feel sympathy and try to help, although sympathy is not necessarily the next step. Empathy and compassion are an essential part of our ability to form and maintain social relationships with others.

People vary in the level of empathy and compassion they feel and express. Factors such as sex (Women tend to have more sympathetic of men), age (older people tend to be more empathic than younger people), and even political preference (liberals score higher on measures of empathy than conservatives) all influence the amount of empathy we experience (Simon-Thomas, 2017).

Other factors such as our knowledge of the person we are observing, the importance of that person and what is happening to the observer, and what we have learned about helping others can also influence the amount of empathy we feel (Preston & De Waal, 2002). Preston and de Waal proposed the Perception-Action Model (PAM) of empathy, in part to account for similarities in empathy that appear across neural species and systems. This model proposes that seeing someone, especially someone important to the observer, in an emotional state automatically activates a representation of that state in the observer. So seeing someone we know and have a relationship with in pain activates our own pain circuit in our brain. The similarity in the way pain is encoded in the brain in different species is what explains the similarity in empathic reactions in these species.

Tanya Singer and her colleagues investigated the neural underpinnings of empathy and the PAM model, which highlights the role that empathy and compassion play in building social relationships. They asked volunteers who were in a relationship with another person to undergo fMRI scans in three different situations. In one case, the woman experienced painful stimulation on her hand. In the second condition, the painful stimulus was delivered to her relationship partner, who was in the same room as the observer. In the third condition, scans were acquired when no stimulus was delivered to any member of the pair (no-pain condition). The women were also asked to take a questionnaire designed to measure empathy after taking the scans.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that when the women experienced pain themselves, both known parts of the brain’s pain circuitry were activated (the sensory component, which codes for where on the body the painful stimulus is applied, and the affective component, which codes for the emotional aspects of that pain). However, when the women watched a loved one in pain, the emotional components of the pain circuit in the anterior insula and rostral anterior cingulate cortex were activated, but not the sensory component. In addition, the higher the score on the empathy scale, the stronger the brain activation.

So, an empathic reaction to another person’s experience does not seem to involve the entire pain circuit, but only the emotional part of that circuit. We feel this noticeable pain because our brains literally know what that pain feels like.

Researchers have also examined how the brain is activated by empathy. Two literature reviews (Kim, Cunnington and Kirby, 2020, and Novak, Malinakova, Mikoska, van Dijk and Tavel, 2022) found that empathy activates a different series of regions compared to empathy. Compassion tends to activate the inferior frontal gyrus, along with areas of the insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and temporal gyrus.

Finally, remember that there are a number of factors that influence our empathy and compassion. One of these factors is learning. Studies have shown that a technique known as compassion contemplation (CM) Can teach empathy and compassion. A recent study found that four weeks of CM training increased strength nervous Responding to the suffering of others is located in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (an area adjacent to and strongly linked to the inferior frontal gyrus, and part of the circuits involved in empathy), and the stronger the feelings of empathy resulting from seeing the suffering of others, the stronger the increase in brain response (Ashar, Andrews-Hanna, Halifax, Dimidjan and Wager, 2021).

It is encouraging to note that we can teach people to be more empathetic and compassionate. We need it now more than ever.