Into your (s)Kin

Into Your (S)Kin: Toward a Comprehensive Conception of Empathy is an article by Tue Emil Öhler Søvsø and Kirstin Burckhardt published in Frontiers of Psychology. There is a public access version here:

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.531688/full

The key ideas include:

Embodied Empathy: The authors argue that empathy is not just a cognitive process but is deeply rooted in our bodily experiences. This concept aligns with the embodied cognition framework, which highlights how bodily interactions with the world shape our mental processes. While empathy is traditionally understood as a cognitive ability to understand others’ feelings, the authors introduce the concept of embodied empathy, where the body plays a crucial role. This view highlights how our sensory and motor experiences, such as touch or movement, shape empathetic connections:

Søvsø and Burckhardt appreciate Fuchs’ emphasis on embodied and interactive elements of empathy but argue that his framework doesn’t fully capture the depth of bodily self-experience. To expand on Fuchs’ work, Søvsø and Burckhardt integrate these internal bodily experiences into the understanding of empathy. They introduce concepts like bodily ownership and affective intentionality to argue that empathy involves a more profound bodily self-relation, which is internally felt and affects how we engage with others emotionally.

For instance, they suggest that when we empathize, we not only interpret another’s facial expression or tone but also feel our own bodily responses—like tension or warmth—which play a significant role in understanding and resonating with others’ emotions:

“While Fuchs effectively brings the body back into the discourse on empathy, we argue that a fuller comprehension requires acknowledging not only the inter-bodily interactions but also the inner bodily sense and proprioceptive experiences that fundamentally shape how empathy is embodied.”


Phenomenological and Stoic Insights: The authors incorporate philosophical traditions, notably phenomenology and Stoicism, into modern empirical research on empathy. They draw on concepts like oikeiosis from Stoicism, which emphasizes the natural extension of care from the self to others:

“Oikeiosis emphasizes the inherent, bodily extension of care from oneself to others, grounded in our shared vulnerability and interdependence, which forms the basis for a more comprehensive view of embodied empathy.”

The authors suggest that oikeiosis enhances the concept of embodied empathy by explaining how humans naturally expand their sense of self to include others, both cognitively and physically. This concept helps move beyond traditional cognitive models by grounding empathy in both self-recognition and shared bodily experiences, reflecting how our connections to others stem from bodily processes as much as they do from cognitive ones​.


Affective Intentionality: The paper explores affective intentionality, the way emotions are directed toward others and how this forms the basis of empathetic experiences. The focus on how emotions guide our empathetic responses moves beyond simple mirroring or simulation theories and offers a more nuanced view of emotional connections:

In contrast to Zahavi and following de Vignemont, we thus agree that empathy is a basically benevolent way of engaging with others where both empathizer and target person experience an affective state. Unlike de Vignemont, however, we do not assume that these states must be similar or that the state of the empathizer has to serve as her basis for understanding the target’s state. It is sufficient that it is a response elicited by the engagement with that state (through simulation or otherwise).

In defining empathy as an engagement which both reveals the target’s affective state and produces an affective response in the empathizer, we thus distinguish empathy from mindreading more broadly both in terms of its proper object and its effect. Empathy, on our view, is a type of mindreading that provides understanding of the affective states of others (widely construed as any state that involves the ascription of affective value, cf. Fuchs’ concept of emotions discussed below, section “Social Understanding: Enactive, and Reflective”), whereas mindreading as such can deal with all types of mental states, including non-valenced beliefs. Also, empathy requires you to feel something for the person you empathize with, not just neutrally (or maliciously) registering their affective state (cf. Gallagher, 2012a who talks of empathy as involving a “primary and irreducible affective state—the state of feeling empathy.”). Empathy, on our account, not only involves understanding, but also an affective response to the state of the target person.