Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives - Coplan

2011

“Under my proposed conceptualization, empathy is a complex imaginative process in which an observer simulates another person’s situated psychological states while maintaining clear self-other differentiation. To say that empathy is ‘complex’ is to say that it is simultaneously a cognitive and affective process. To say that empathy is ‘imaginative’ is to say that it involves the representation of a target’s states that are activated by, but not directly accessible through, the observer’s perception. And to say that empathy is a ‘simulation’ is to say that the observer replicates or reconstructs the target’s experiences, while maintaining a clear sense of self–other differentiation.” (P.5)

Coplan, Amy. Page 5-7, 13, 16-18, Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects, in: Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, Oxford University Press, 2011.