Empath: Definition, Types, & Traits

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph.D. Candidate

What are empaths, and how do you know if you’re an empath?

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In my time as a therapist, I have heard all sorts of reactions when I tell people about my work. It is not uncommon for people to confide that they’ve thought about this career path for themselves. Then there are many people who say they have no interest in being a therapist, that this line of work just wouldn’t be right for them.

Finally, there are a select few who tell me that, although they would love to be a therapist, they could never do it because they care too much: They would get too invested and have too hard a time leaving the job behind at the end of the day.

I believe those people, and I believe they are what we have recently come to call empaths. Things that might sound cliché or unreasonable to some of us are exactly the experiences that might define an empath: tearing up when they hear about a tragedy somewhere far away, or perhaps wanting to adopt every single stray animal they meet. Many people have big hearts, but empaths feel so readily with others that it can be hard for them to dial down the intensity of their feelings. This might make being a therapist overwhelming for them, but it can also empower them to be highly dedicated, caring, and altruistic friends, coworkers, and family members. Let’s see what the science has to say about these high-in-empathy types.

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What Is an Empath? (A Definition)

An empath is a person who regularly behaves in highly empathic ways (Hall & Schwartz, 2019). This seems to be because they have a natural predisposition to experience empathy, and they experience it more readily and more intensely than other people. Empaths not only experience other people’s emotions easily, they also take those people’s perspectives and behave with more compassion and care than other people.

Perhaps from even this brief description, you can see how empaths are capable of providing incredible support to other people and can simultaneously find the whole experience of being deep in others’ feelings to be too much. This is especially the case for empaths who find themselves—as empaths often do—in the helping professions. While their empathic skills make them highly attuned and thoughtful caregivers, they may become burned out professionally as they experience empathic distress—the stress and emotional turmoil associated with being continually exposed to other people’s hardship and pain (McCray et al., 2008).

Opposite of an Empath

There are people who experience little to no empathy for others, and they can rightly be considered the opposites of empaths. The trait of being callous toward others is common in certain psychiatric disorders, such as psychopathy and sociopathy (Blair, 2007); people with these diagnoses may or may not be aware of other people’s emotions, but they are almost certainly feeling very little of what other people are feeling. In one of the more chilling examples of this that I can recall, a serial killer and psychopath was once surprised to learn that the facial expression made by his victims just before he brutally attacked them was in fact the emotion he had heard about called “fear.”

Psychologists have wondered why some people are capable of so little empathy, and it has been hypothesized that they may struggle with recognizing emotional facial expressions. For example, one study found that people high in empathy had an easier time recognizing faces they had seen before than people low in empathy (Bate et al., 2010). However, this finding is not consistent across all people with empathy deficits, so it may be that the breakdown in their ability to feel what others are feeling happens somewhere else in their process of perceiving and interacting with others (Blair, 2007).

Another potential candidate for this gap is in facial responses to other people’s emotions. Interestingly, people who score higher on empathy measures have more of a mirroring facial response to the emotions of others (Balconi & Canavesio, 2013). Their tendency to mimic the expressions of others may actually help them feel more deeply what those others are experiencing.

There are obvious drawbacks both to being extremely empathic and to being barely empathic at all. As a therapist, I know I need to find the right balance. Too little empathy and my clients feel managed or analyzed but not cared for and understood. Too much empathy and I may try to save my client from their feelings, losing my focus on what their emotions are trying to tell them in the moment.

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Examples of Empaths

The term empath is not an established diagnosis like bipolar disorder or generalized anxiety disorder, which means it is instead a label that people choose for themselves based on their experiences being around others who are emotional. The empaths I know are careful about the energy that they invite into their lives. They know that if they listen to a podcast about a distressing topic or watch a tragic movie just before bed, they may be too worked up to fall asleep. They often have to set boundaries around topics in conversation or how much support they can provide a friend.

The empaths I know are also exactly the people you want around during an emotionally distressing situation. They seem to have an intuitive sense of what other people who are struggling need. When they are well-resourced, these empaths jump right into a difficult situation, offering deep understanding of what other people are going through and instinctively taking action to help them through their feelings.

Benefits of Being an Empath

Evolutionary biologists and psychologists talk about the benefits of having what is called a “theory of mind,” or the awareness that another person is having their own distinct experience of the world—and maybe some insight into what that experience is like as well (Yager, 2015). Why is this adaptive? Being able to anticipate what others want and need makes us more adept social beings, able to successfully negotiate for, defend, and share more resources.

This kind of “mind reading” should function not just on a cognitive level, where we understand how others are probably thinking, but also on an emotional level. Understanding how others are feeling—emotional mind reading—should be just as evolutionarily advantageous as cognitively grasping another person’s experience (Yager, 2015).

This evolutionary hypothesis sure seems to be borne out by research. People who are higher in what is called “trait empathy,” meaning they are consistently and naturally empathic, seem to live more fulfilling lives, with greater happiness, personal growth, self-acceptance, and sense of purpose in life (Choi et al., 2016). This may be because exercising empathy often leads us to take prosocial or altruistic action, which can result in better and longer-lasting relationships.

The ability to feel and think along with another person seems to help us cope with difficult interpersonal situations too: People high in empathy get more social support and use fewer poor coping skills and more adaptive coping skills than people low in empathy (Sun et al., 2019). I think I have personally experienced this, as I can often understand why somebody might have done something that inadvertently upset me. While I do not want to dismiss my angry or frustrated response altogether, it helps me not stay angry if I quickly understand where the other person was coming from and also even feel a little bit of what they were probably feeling.

Empathic vs. Empathetic

Most of the time, we use the words empathic and empathetic pretty interchangeably. It might be more accurate to think of empathic as being a word that describes people and personalities, while empathetic describes certain actions or moments in time (Song et al., 2019). This can be a helpful distinction in the sense that even people who are not very empathic by nature can have moments of being very empathetic. However, I would not worry too much about which word you use—people will understand your intentions either way.

Empaths and Intuition

Empaths can seem very intuitive, but psychologists have started to pinpoint how they naturally come to understand others through picking up on nonverbal cues (Yager, 2015). For example, behaviors we have already discussed, such as mentalizing (mind reading) and mirroring of others’ facial expressions, seem to be natural processes that empaths undertake and that provide them, perhaps not entirely on a conscious level, with crucial information about the other person’s status. When we unwittingly or wittingly mimic how others are behaving, it seems we can reasonably assume that whatever our experience holds in that moment is also what the other person is going through. This whole process is intuitive in the sense that it occurs so quickly and with so little conscious effort that it can seem effortless and automatic. And to an extent, it is.

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Empaths and Narcissists

Narcissists are so absorbed in their own experiences that they have difficulty experiencing any empathy for others (Petric et al., 2019). In this sense, they are also the opposites of empaths, for whom other person’s emotions might actually be hard to avoid feeling.

Types of Empaths

There are not exactly different types of empaths, but there are different types of empathy (Yaghoubi Jami et al., 2019). Many psychologists distinguish, in ways that this article already has, between cognitive and affective empathy. Cognitive empathy is understanding another’s experience on a thinking level—fully understanding what their thought pattern is. At this level of empathy, one understands the other person’s emotional state but is not experiencing it along with the other person. Affective empathy is what happens when we let those emotions become our emotions as well.

Both types of empathy are helpful and important in relating to other people. For example, we want health care providers to at least cognitively empathize with clients; a full understanding of the other person’s feelings and thoughts might be necessary to help guide them in effective medical decision-making. On the other hand, cognitive empathy might not be as helpful as affective empathy when your friend calls to say that they and their partner broke up today.

Traits of an Empath

As we have already established, empaths are good at empathic actions: understanding and feeling others’ emotions, showing compassionate care, and taking others’ perspectives (Salovey & Mayer, 1990). But research tells us so much more that is interesting about empaths. For example, people high in empathy tend to really enjoy listening to sad music, and this may be because feeling the sad music is similar to the rewarding experience of feeling along with another person (Taruffi et al., 2021). Empathic people seem to respond similarly to physical artwork: They more readily make inferences about what the artist was probably feeling, and then they often experience those feelings themselves (Stavrova & Meckel, 2017).

Jobs for Empaths

Empathy is an especially important characteristic for people in the helping professions (Moudatsou et al., 2020), although, as we have noted, empaths may also experience stress and burnout from working in these professions. Thinking more broadly, empathy is a useful resource for all kinds of work, even that of being a CEO (König et al., 2020). Just about any position that requires interacting with other people and leveraging one’s empathic response to them to get the job done might be a good position for an empath.

Empaths in Relationships

Empaths are highly effective in relating to other people, in the sense that empathy is a relationship asset. Since empathy promotes prosocial behavior, interpersonal communication, and social connectedness, it likely helps us have healthier relationships (Eisenberg & Fabes, 1990). For example, some research suggests that more empathic people have more adaptive ways to cope with relationship challenges (O’Brien et al., 2009).

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Articles Related to Empaths

Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Empaths

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Empaths

Empaths have so much—occasionally too much—of a crucial human skill. They are the people you want on your side in a tough emotional moment; they are also people whose boundaries with other people’s emotions can be nearly transparent, making the world an overstimulating place for them. If you or someone you know identifies as an empath, or you are just curious to learn more about what life is like with this identity, I encourage you to watch the following video:

Video: The Empath's Survival Guide

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References

Balconi, M., & Canavesio, Y. (2013). Emotional contagion and trait empathy in prosocial behavior in young people: the contribution of autonomic (facial feedback) and balanced emotional empathy scale (BEES) measures. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 35(1), 41–48.
Bate, S., Parris, B., Haslam, C., & Kay, J. (2010). Socio-emotional functioning and face recognition ability in the normal population. Personality and Individual Differences, 48(2), 239–242.
Blair, R. J. R. (2007). Empathic dysfunction in psychopathic individuals. Empathy in Mental Illness, 1, 3–16.
Choi, D., Minote, N., Sekiya, T., & Watanuki, S. (2016). Relationships between trait empathy and psychological well-being in Japanese university students. Psychology, 7(9), 1240–1247.
Eisenberg, N., & Fabes, R. A. (1990). Empathy: Conceptualization, measurement, and relation to prosocial behavior. Motivation and Emotion, 14(2), 131–149.
Hall, J. A., & Schwartz, R. (2019). Empathy present and future. The Journal of Social Psychology, 159(3), 225–243.
König, A., Graf-Vlachy, L., Bundy, J., & Little, L. M. (2020). A blessing and a curse: How CEOs’ trait empathy affects their management of organizational crises. Academy of Management Review, 45(1), 130–153.
McCray, L. W., Cronholm, P. F., Bogner, H. R., Gallo, J. J., & Neill, R. A. (2008). Resident physician burnout: is there hope? Family Medicine, 40(9), 626–632.
Moudatsou, M., Stavropoulou, A., Philalithis, A., & Koukouli, S. (2020). The role of empathy in health and social care professionals. Healthcare, 8(1), 126.
O’Brien, T. B., DeLongis, A., Pomaki, G., Puterman, E., & Zwicker, A. (2009). Couples coping with stress: The role of empathic responding. European Psychologist, 14(1), 18–28.
Petric, D., Hotchkiss, P., & James, F. (2019). Healthy vs. narcissistic self-love.
Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9(3), 185–211.
Song, Y., Nie, T., Shi, W., Zhao, X., & Yang, Y. (2019). Empathy impairment in individuals with autism spectrum conditions from a multidimensional perspective: A meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1902.
Stavrova, O., & Meckel, A. (2017). Perceiving emotion in non-social targets: The effect of trait empathy on emotional contagion through art. Motivation and Emotion, 41, 492–509.
Sun, R., Vuillier, L., Hui, B. P., & Kogan, A. (2019). Caring helps: Trait empathy is related to better coping strategies and differs in the poor versus the rich. PLOS ONE, 14(3), e0213142.
Taruffi, L., Skouras, S., Pehrs, C., & Koelsch, S. (2021). Trait empathy shapes neural responses toward sad music. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 21(1), 231–241.
Yager, J. (2015). Updating empathy. Psychiatry, 78(2), 134–140.
Yaghoubi Jami, P., Mansouri, B., Thoma, S. J., & Han, H. (2019). An investigation of the divergences and convergences of trait empathy across two cultures. Journal of Moral Education, 48(2), 214–229.

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