What We Talk About When We Talk About Empathy: Toward a Common Lexicon of Empathy-Related Constructs

Almost since the term “empathy” was coined, there has been scholarly disagreement about its meaning. Today it can best be viewed as an umbrella term encompassing a host of more specific constructs, almost all of which are regularly referred to as “empathy” in some form or fashion. Promiscuous use of this global label to denote very different constructs has impaired communication among and between scholars, practitioners, and the general public. A team of 15 empathy scholars assessed this issue and created a lexicon for these specific lower-order constructs. In this article we report the result of this effort. The lower-order constructs making up this lexicon are vicarious affect , emotional contagion , emotion co-sharing , sympathy / compassion , personal distress , perspective taking , accurate inference , mimicry , synchrony , projection , and transportation . We recommend that this more specific language be used more frequently and that the umbrella term “empathy” be used more sparingly.