A Visual Explainer

Empathy and Compassion

Feeling With vs. Feeling For — and Why It Matters

Informal summary based on the research of Tania Singer & Olga M. Klimecki. For exact context, refer to the original paper. 

The One Thing to Take From This Paper

When researchers trained people to empathize more deeply with suffering, they felt worse. When they then trained those same people in compassion, the negative feelings reversed — and the brain recruited an entirely different neural network. Empathy and compassion are not the same thing. One depletes. The other sustains.

This distinction — confirmed by neuroimaging, behavioral research, and training studies — has profound implications for anyone who cares for others. Empathic distress leads to withdrawal. Compassion leads to action. And crucially, the capacity for compassion can be deliberately trained, even in a matter of days.

Empathy has long been considered a virtue — the capacity to feel what another person feels, to share in their suffering, to be moved by their pain. But feeling with someone and caring for someone turn out to be very different things. And science has now found a way to tell them apart.

As humans we are a highly social species. To coordinate our joint actions and assure successful communication, we use language to explicitly convey information, and social abilities such as empathy to infer another person's emotions and mental state. Empathy makes it possible to resonate with others' positive and negative feelings alike — we can share the joy of others, and we can share the experience of suffering when we empathize with someone in pain. Importantly, in empathy one feels with someone, but one does not confuse oneself with the other — one still knows that the emotion one resonates with is the emotion of another. When that self–other distinction is not present, we speak of emotion contagion, a precursor of empathy already present in babies.

While shared happiness is a very pleasant state, the sharing of suffering can at times be difficult — especially when the self–other distinction becomes blurred. This can be particularly challenging for persons working in helping professions, such as doctors, therapists, and nurses. In order to prevent an excessive sharing of suffering that may turn into distress, one may respond to the suffering of others with compassion. But what does that shift actually involve? And can it be trained? Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki set out to answer exactly that.

The Fork

Two responses that empathy can become when we encounter someone suffering

The Fork in the Road: Why Empathy Isn't Always Enough

Empathic distress is a strong aversive and self-oriented response to the suffering of others, accompanied by the desire to withdraw from a situation in order to protect oneself from excessive negative feelings. Compassion, on the other hand, is conceived as a feeling of concern for another person's suffering which is accompanied by the motivation to help. By consequence, it is associated with approach and prosocial motivation. Where distress turns inward, compassion turns outward.

Research by Daniel Batson and Nancy Eisenberg in the fields of social and developmental psychology confirmed that people who feel compassion in a given situation help more often than people who suffer from empathic distress. And crucially, Daniel Batson's work showed that the extent to which people feel compassion can be increased by explicitly instructing participants to feel with the target person — demonstrating that this capacity is not fixed but can be shifted. Compassion, in other words, is not simply a trait one has or lacks. It is a trainable capacity.

The terms themselves carry this distinction in their etymology. The word empathy has its origins in the Greek word empatheia (passion), composed of en (in) and pathos (feeling); it entered English via the German notion of Einfühlung (feeling into), which originally described resonance with works of art and only later was used to describe the resonance between human beings. The term compassion is derived from the Latin com (with/together) and pati (to suffer). In spite of their shared roots in the idea of feeling alongside another, they name two very different responses to suffering.

The Shared Brain: How Empathy Shows Up in Neuroscience

When you stub your toe, a particular set of brain regions activates — including the anterior insula and the anterior middle cingulate cortex (aMCC). What neuroimaging studies have shown, repeatedly and across multiple labs, is that when you watch someone else stub their toe, many of those same regions activate too. The brain does not cleanly separate first-hand experience from vicarious experience. In a meaningful sense, we feel others' pain in the same neural structures where we feel our own.

These "shared neuronal networks" have now been documented not just for pain, but for touch, disgust, taste, and social reward. Meta-analyses across dozens of studies confirm that the anterior insula and aMCC are the most consistent nodes of this empathy-for-pain network — activated both when we suffer and when we witness suffering.

But the magnitude of this empathic activation is not fixed. It is shaped by who the other person is and how we feel about them. Studies by Singer's lab showed that witnessing the suffering of a perceived in-group `member` — say, a fan of the same football team — produced stronger anterior insula activation than witnessing an out-group `member` suffer. Similarly, watching someone who had previously behaved fairly produce more empathic brain response than watching someone who had behaved unfairly. Our brain's empathy is not a simple mirror. It is a selective and evaluative one.

And critically, that anterior insula signal is not just a measure of felt empathy — it is predictive. The stronger a participant's empathic brain response, the more likely they were to engage in altruistic helping behavior afterward. The felt response and the behavioral response are linked at the level of neural circuitry.

Training the Compassionate Brain: Loving Kindness and Its Effects

If empathy is our default response to others' suffering, compassion requires cultivation. The most widely studied method for doing this is loving kindness training — a meditation-based practice with roots in Buddhist contemplative tradition, now extensively studied in secular research settings.

The practice is carried out in silence. It involves systematically visualizing a series of people — beginning with someone you feel very close to, then extending outward to acquaintances, strangers, and eventually even people you find difficult — and cultivating feelings of warmth, friendliness, and benevolence toward each of them in turn. The aim is to strengthen the capacity to genuinely wish others well, until that orientation becomes more habitual and less effortful.

The effects are well-documented. Research by Barbara Fredrickson and colleagues showed that several weeks of regular compassion training increased participants' self-reported positive affect, broadened their personal resources, and improved their sense of well-being in daily life. The benefits were not just internal — they radiated outward. More recent work from Singer's own lab showed that participants who underwent loving kindness and compassion training increased their rate of helping strangers in a specially designed computer game, compared to a control group. And the more time participants had spent in compassion practice, the more their purely altruistic helping — as distinct from reciprocity-based helping — increased. Compassion training does not just make people more norm-compliant; it appears to genuinely deepen prosocial motivation.

The implications extend beyond the individual. Empathic distress, when experienced chronically by people in helping professions, is one of the primary pathways to burnout. Compassion training offers a potential counterweight: a way to remain open to others' suffering without being overwhelmed by it. Feeling for rather than feeling with turns out to be both more sustainable and more effective.

Two Trainings, Two Brain Networks

Empathy training and compassion training activate distinct — and largely non-overlapping — neural systems

Plasticity: How Training Reshapes the Social Brain

For a long time, the neuroscientific study of empathy focused on mapping the systems that underlie it. A newer and arguably more important question has been: can these systems be changed? The answer — from both behavioral psychology and neuroscience — is yes.

Early hints came from cross-sectional studies comparing long-term meditators to novices. Research by Antoine Lutz and Richard Davidson found that expert meditators, when exposed to distressing sounds, showed heightened activation in the middle insula relative to beginners — suggesting that years of contemplative practice had altered their baseline capacity to resonate with others' suffering.

More compelling evidence came from longitudinal studies conducted in Singer's lab. Meditation-naïve participants were scanned before and after undergoing either empathy training or compassion training, while watching film clips depicting others' suffering. The results were striking. Empathy training — several days of practice in resonating with others' feelings — increased activation in the anterior insula and aMCC, and increased participants' negative affect. The training worked: people became more empathically attuned. But that attunement came at a cost to their own emotional state.

Then, in a crucial follow-on study, the same participants underwent compassion training. And the compassion training reversed the negative affect that empathy training had produced — reducing negative feelings and increasing positive ones — while recruiting an entirely different, non-overlapping brain network centered on the medial orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum. Compassion training did not diminish empathic attunement; it provided an antidote to its costs.

This is perhaps the most important finding in the paper: empathy and compassion are not the same thing, they activate different brain circuits, and the shift from one to the other can be deliberately cultivated. The social brain is plastic. How we respond to others' suffering is, to a meaningful degree, a skill.

Why This Matters: For Helpers and for All of Us

Empathic distress, when experienced chronically, most likely gives rise to negative health outcomes. Compassionate responses, by contrast, are based on positive, other-oriented feelings and the activation of prosocial motivation and behavior. The finding that this shift is possible — and trainable — is particularly consequential for persons working in helping professions, such as doctors, therapists, and nurses, or in stressful environments in general.

Compassion training not only promotes prosocial behavior but also augments positive affect and resilience, which in turn fosters better coping with stressful situations. This opens up many opportunities for the targeted development of adaptive social emotions and motivation. The social brain, it turns out, is malleable in precisely the direction that matters most.

Open Questions

The research so far has established the core distinction compellingly. What remains is the territory of ongoing investigation. How long do the effects of compassion training persist? Can they reshape not just brain function but brain structure — the actual anatomy of the social brain? What neurotransmitters are at work in these different networks? And when is the optimal developmental window for learning these skills — is there a period in childhood or adolescence when such training might be especially formative?

These questions point toward a larger ambition: an education in emotional life that goes beyond knowing about feelings to actually training them. Singer and Klimecki's framework suggests that this is not naive idealism. The social brain is malleable. The question is simply how, and how early, we choose to cultivate it.

The discovery that empathy and compassion are distinct — psychologically, behaviorally, and neurologically — is more than an academic finding. It reframes a question that most of us have never thought to ask: when I respond to someone in pain, am I feeling with them or for them? The difference may seem small. But in the brain, in the body, and in the moment of action that follows, it turns out to make all the difference.

Based on: Singer, T., & Klimecki, O.M. (2014). Empathy and compassion. Current Biology, 24(18), R875–R878.

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