Insights from the inside of empathy: Investigating the experiential dimension of empathy through introspection

Empathy is commonly defined as the ability to feel another person's emotion, and has previously received significant attention from various research communities. The third-person nature of these approaches has revealed fundamental insights into core aspects of empathy; however, much about the experiential nature of the empathic state remains unknown. In our current study, we pursue a novel first-person phenomenological approach in order to differentiate subtle aspects of empathy that cannot be captured from an outside examiner's point of view. Our findings show the following: (1) the empathic experience can be subdivided into different components, (2) the relationship between the source and target of the empathic response can be classified into different modes, (3) the empathic state can be deliberately modified, and (4) pre-reflective states can be accessed. Our first-person approach to the study of empathy extends findings from third-person research, accessing important new avenues for further research.