An Appraisal Theory of Empathy and Other Vicarious Emotional Experiences

Empathy, feeling what others feel, is regarded as a special phenomenon that is separate from other emotional experiences. Emotion theories say little about feeling emotions for others and empathy theories say little about how feeling emotions for others relates to normal firsthand emotional experience. Current empathy theories focus on how we feel emotions for others who feel the same thing, but not how we feel emotions for others that they do not feel, such as feeling angry for someone who is sad or feeling embarrassed for someone who is self-assured. We propose an appraisal theory of vicarious emotional experiences, including empathy, based on appraisal theories of emotion. According to this theory, emotions for others are based on how we evaluate their situations, just as firsthand emotions are based on how we evaluate our own situations. We discuss how this framework can predict empathic emotion matching and also the experience of emotions for others that do not match what they feel. The theory treats empathy as a normal part of emotional experience.