When you have high cognitive empathy already, how do you increase your affective/emotional empathy? Should you even bother trying to increase your affective/emotional empathy, if your cognitive empathy is high? Why or why not?

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Hi Lydia! Great question. Dunno if it’s yours but thanks for pointing it my way.

I personally think it’s very important to try to increase your ‘actual’ empathy, and not just rely on your ‘cognitive’ empathy. I’ll first start with my personal experience.

I have always had really good cognitive empathy, I think people with not-so-great early childhoods often develop it as a coping and defense mechanism. When crappy things happen to you for reasons that are no fault of your own, the natural tendency of smart people is going to be to figure out what makes these people that are making you do and say things you don’t want to do and say tick.

Being that kids learn faster than adults, I don’t have any doubt at all that many many children born and raised in the 80s wind up developing a very good fine-tuned theory of mind.

That all said, cognitive empathy is absolutely not the same as having real, actual, strong feelings. Where you don’t just know how someone is feeling but can also feel it yourself.

Primary place where it benefits you is relationships. You don’t want to be timid or fearful to express those feelings. If you’re just knowing the feelings, not actually feeling the feelings, then your partner is going to eventually realize that there’s only half of a relationship going on here. Dealing with narcissists a lot can make it rub off on you.

I say, if you have a working empathic center, if you’re not an actual psychopath that’s physically incapable of feeling emotions, you should never choose to rely on cognitive empathy. Your limbic system is part of your brain. It evolved for a reason. Cognitive processing is necessarily slower than the purpose-built wiring of the amygdala and limbic system. Develop your feelings, work them into your lived experience. It can hurt sometimes but the depth of emotional feeling is every bit worth the occasional pain. And the pain itself can be deep and worthwhile too.

I realized this sometime in my twenties and I purposely decided to ‘chase my feelings’ wherever I could find them. Anything that would make me feel something, anything, deeper than just my normal thoughts, I’d do, and I’d do it hard. What I hit upon was particularly sad anime shows. For a few years, I was a glutton for sad, awful stories about sad, awful things happening to people that really deserved better. It was extremely therapeutic for me, the catharsis helped me break into a new kind of experiencing.

I believe sadness and tragedy are a kind of shortcut to kickstarting the empathic process. Much much better than comedy. Tragedy has easier to distinguish ‘shading’. You can analyze comedy rather dispassionately, but in order to appreciate and enjoy tragedy, you need to exercise your sympathetic brain.

But this is the sort of thing you’ll just start doing on your own once you recognize the need to. Exercising new parts of your brain really gives you a dopamine rush, and you can ‘hone in’ on that rush. Maybe you’ll gravitate towards certain kinds of comedy or what they’re calling ‘dramedy’ these days.