As I understand it there’s two main kinds of empathy: cognitive and affective.
Cognitive empathy is the ability to perceive and understand the emotional states of others, and affective empathy is actually sharing those emotions yourself.
I do the former, but the latter doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Like, if I see someone being sad, it’s possible that I’ll be sad or angry that they’re in that situation, but those will be my feelings about what’s going on, not theirs.
But for those of you who inherently feel-what-you-see, how does this work with, say, anger?
If you see someone being terribly angry, do you feel angry yourself? If so, who do you feel angry at? If you see a fight going on, do you hate both participants?
If someone is angry at you, are you also angry at you?
I guess this applies to any targeted emotion, but anger is a good example.
For me personally I don’t have much control over my empathy. Sure I can look at someone and glean their emotional state based on conscious guessing, but my “affective empathy” as you put it, is more my brain subconsciously picking up on their emotional state and then sharing it.
For most emotions, including anger, it’s not targeted. Not until I actively participate in the emotion. It’s also not something that applies to everyone and every situation, with my own personal emotions easily overriding the empathetic emotions.
Of course, everyone experiences empathy their own way.