When the Two Sides of Empathy Fall Out of Balance

Shalev and Uzefovsky make some interesting distinctions between different forms of empathy. Here is ChatGPT's distillation of their text: 

Empathy is usually discussed as though people simply possess more or less of it. Ido Shalev and Florina Uzefovsky argue that this misses an important distinction. Cognitive empathy is the capacity to understand what another person is feeling, while emotional empathy is the degree to which we are ourselves affected by that feeling. The authors suggest that many social and psychological difficulties may arise not from too little empathy, but from an imbalance between these two capacities—what they call empathic disequilibrium.

Someone whose emotional empathy greatly exceeds cognitive empathy may absorb another person’s distress without being able to understand, label, contextualize, or regulate the resulting response. Other people’s emotions can then feel overwhelming. The reverse imbalance—strong cognitive understanding with relatively little emotional resonance—may produce accurate social analysis that nevertheless feels detached or emotionally thin, either to the person or to those around them.

These two patterns have been associated with different psychological traits. Emotional-empathy dominance has been linked with emotional reactivity, anxiety, autism, schizophrenia, and, in some autistic individuals, self-injury. Cognitive-empathy dominance has been associated with depressive symptoms, psychopathic traits, and some features of autism and schizophrenia. In several studies, the imbalance predicted clinical traits more reliably than either component of empathy or the person’s total empathy score.

This approach challenges the persistent claim that autistic people generally lack empathy. Some may instead feel other people’s emotions intensely while having difficulty identifying or interpreting what is happening. Their outward response may consequently fail to match social expectations. What appears to be indifference may sometimes be emotional overload, difficulty translating feeling into communication, or simply a different empathic style. This fits with the “double empathy” view that misunderstandings between autistic and non-autistic people can be mutual rather than evidence of a defect located entirely within the autistic person.

The clinical implication is that increasing “empathy” indiscriminately may be misguided. Teaching someone more cognitive perspective-taking could worsen an existing imbalance, just as encouraging emotional immersion might overwhelm someone already excessively reactive to others’ distress. A more useful question is how the person’s emotional and cognitive responses relate to one another, in which situations the imbalance occurs, and whether it is actually causing distress or impaired functioning.

The evidence remains preliminary. Most studies rely on questionnaires and cross-sectional correlations; the measures were not originally designed to compare the two forms of empathy directly, and it is not known whether empathic disequilibrium causes psychological difficulties or results from them. The imbalance is also common in the general population—roughly a third of people show relatively high levels—and is not inherently pathological. Its effects presumably depend on degree, context, emotional regulation, and the demands of a particular social environment.

The broader message is that empathy is not a single quantity. Its effectiveness may depend as much on coordination between feeling and understanding as on the strength of either one. This shift from asking “How empathic is this person?” to “How are this person’s empathic capacities organized?” offers a less stigmatizing and potentially more useful account of human social differences.