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In the empathy‐altruism hypothesis, empathic concern refers to other‐oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of a person in need. This other‐oriented emotion has been called by several names other than empathic concern, including compassion, tenderness, sympathy, and pity. The label applied isn’t crucial. What’s crucial is that the emotion involves feeling for the other, not feeling as the other feels. (Feeling as is a currently popular conception of empathy employed by, for example, Paul Bloom [2016]; Nancy Eisenberg [Eisenberg & Strayer, 1987], and Tania Singer [De Vignemont & Singer, 2006].) Empathic concern also is not a combination of other‐oriented emotion and motivation. Although many people use the terms compassion and sympathy to refer to the emotional state I am calling empathic concern, there are some scholars who use one or both of these terms to refer to other‐oriented motivation as well as to emotion, making the terms more equivalent to the whole empathy‐altruism hypothesis (see, for example, Goetz, Keltner, & Simon‐Thomas, 2010; Wispé, 1986). For me, empathic concern produces motivation but is not itself a motivational state. I think the question of the nature of the motivation produced by empathic concern – egoistic or altruistic – should be left open for empirical investigation, not finessed by definitional decree.

To further clarify what is meant by empathic concern, let me add four quick points:

1 To say that the other‐oriented emotion is “congruent with the perceived welfare of a person in need,” refers to a congruence of valence. The emotion’s valence is negative because the perceived welfare of a person in need is negative. But this congruence doesn’t mean that the empathizer and the person in need are feeling the same negative emotion. It would be congruent, for example, to feel sad or sorry for someone who’s upset and afraid. Or to feel compassion for the unconscious victim of a mugging (as did the Good Samaritan: Luke 10:33), even though an unconscious victim is feeling nothing at all.

2 Although the term empathy is broad enough to include situations in which there is no perceived need – such as when we feel empathic joy at a friend’s good fortune (Smith, Keating, & Stotland, 1989; Stotland, 1969) – not all empathic emotion is hypothesized to produce altruistic motivation. The empathy‐altruism hypothesis refers specifically to empathic concern felt when another is perceived to be in need, because without a perceived need, there’s no reason to increase the other’s welfare.

3 Empathic concern isn’t a single, discrete emotion but includes a whole constellation of emotions. It includes feelings that people report as sympathy, compassion, softheartedness, tenderness, sorrow, sadness, upset, distress, concern, grief, and more.

4 Although feelings of sympathy and compassion are inherently other‐oriented, we can feel sorrow, distress, and concern that is self‐oriented – as when something bad happens directly to us. Both other‐oriented and self‐oriented versions of these emotions may be described as feeling sorry or sad, upset or distressed, concerned or grieved. This breadth of usage invites confusion. The relevant psychological distinction doesn’t lie in the emotional label used – sad, distressed, concerned – but in whose welfare is the focus of the emotion. Are we feeling sad, distressed, concerned for the other? Or are we feeling this way as a result of what has befallen us (including, perhaps, the experience of seeing the other suffer)?

In recent years, the term empathy has been applied to a range of psychological phenomena in addition to the other‐oriented emotion just described (see Batson, 2009, for a partial review). Here’s a quick list:

 Knowing another’s thoughts and feelings.

 Adopting the posture or matching the neural response of another.

 Coming to feel as another feels.

 Feeling personal distress at witnessing another’s suffering.

 Imagining how you would think and feel in another’s place.

 Imagining how another thinks and feels.

 A general disposition (trait) to feel for others.

Each of these phenomena is distinct from empathic concern. The empathy‐altruism hypothesis makes no claim that any of them produces altruistic motivation except if and when it evokes empathic concern. Further, the hypothesis makes no claim that any of them is either necessary or sufficient to produce empathic concern.