Empathy in twentieth-century psychology

Abstract

The story of empathy in twentieth-century psychology is of a gradual movement from general theoretical treatments to more specific empirical investigations of particular research questions. Late in the twentieth century, neuropsychology began to make rapid advances in identifying some of the neural underpinnings of both cognitive and affective forms of empathy. Piaget was among the first psychologists to argue for a primarily cognitive definition of empathy. Finally, empathy's possible role in personal relationships has also attracted research attention. Both the affective and cognitive traditions argue that empathy in some form is necessary to help us deal with the fundamental obstacle in social life: namely, other people. Outside of developmental psychology the cognitive tradition primarily took the form of an emphasis on empathy's role in enhancing accuracy in person perception, what is sometimes termed social acuity.