When Empathy Gets The Meaning Wrong (Beyond Empathy: The Path to Co-Independence, Ep. 4)

Here's a term called emotional contagion.

Emotional contagion describes how we can catch another person's emotion.

Someone's laughter gets us laughing.

Their visible nervousness leaves us feeling uneasy.

We can become affected before we've understood much about the situation.

Researchers Tanya Singer and Klaus Lam distinguish this from empathy.

That includes awareness of the difference between self and other.

Feeling something in response to you still leaves two people having an experience.

It doesn't turn my feeling into direct access to yours.

I'll use the term emotional resonance, emotional resonance here for being moved by another person's emotion, including times when a similar feeling arises in us.

The phrase describes a response.

It doesn't certify an interpretation.

So suppose your friend cries after accepting a job in a different city.

You feel sad too.

You might be sharing some of their sadness.

But what are the tears about? What's the sadness about? Perhaps they're grieving the daily contact they lose with friends.

Perhaps they're relieved after months of uncertainty.

Perhaps both experiences are present.

If you conclude you don't really want this job, you've added a claim that tears alone can't establish.

Even when two people correctly name the same emotion, they may connect to it in different ways to different things.

You feel sad about the move because you imagined being alone.

Your friend feels sad because a meaningful chapter is ending while still looking forward to the next one.

You haven't failed by feeling with them.

The mistake would be treating that shared feeling as the whole explanation.

Here's a term called emotional contagion.

Emotional contagion describes how we can catch another person's emotion.

Someone's laughter gets us laughing.

Their visible nervousness leaves us feeling uneasy.

We can become affected before we've understood much about the situation.

Researchers Tanya Singer and Klaus Lam distinguish this from empathy.

That includes awareness of the difference between self and other.

Feeling something in response to you still leaves two people having an experience.

It doesn't turn my feeling into direct access to yours.

I'll use the term emotional resonance, emotional resonance here for being moved by another person's emotion, including times when a similar feeling arises in us.

The phrase describes a response.

It doesn't certify an interpretation.

So suppose your friend cries after accepting a job in a different city.

You feel sad too.

You might be sharing some of their sadness.

But what are the tears about? What's the sadness about? Perhaps they're grieving the daily contact they lose with friends.

Perhaps they're relieved after months of uncertainty.

Perhaps both experiences are present.

If you conclude you don't really want this job, you've added a claim that tears alone can't establish.

Even when two people correctly name the same emotion, they may connect to it in different ways to different things.

You feel sad about the move because you imagined being alone.

Your friend feels sad because a meaningful chapter is ending while still looking forward to the next one.

You haven't failed by feeling with them.

The mistake would be treating that shared feeling as the whole explanation.