Profiles in empathy: Different empathic responses to emotional and physical suffering.

Empathy often occurs when individuals witness another suffer. Researchers who study empathy have tried to identify reliable behavioral outcomes, affective responses, and physiological changes associated with its experience. However to date, these markers of empathy have remained elusive. We propose that failing to take into account the features of the suffering that elicited the empathy has contributed to this problem. We hypothesized that...