Cognitive empathy is the ability to recognize and understand what another person is feeling.

Affective empathy is the ability to emotionally resonate with another person’s feelings — to feel something in response to what they’re experiencing.

You can have one without the other. You can be highly skilled at reading someone else’s emotional state without actually sharing their feelings. And you can feel deeply for someone without being especially good at figuring out exactly what they’re feeling.

But neither one, by itself, tells us what you’ll do with another person’s suffering.

On the dark side, as you’ll see, that last line is key to understanding Malignant Narcissists and psychopaths.

On the light side, it also explains how the rest of us express positive empathy.

Source: Frank George, Ph.D. Substack