Empath: Definition, Types, & Traits

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.
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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.

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).

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.
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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.

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.
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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.

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.
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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.

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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