For centuries, as being shaped by a consumer and self-centered society, we have adopted a certain acute sense of selfishness and competitiveness. It seems that we have partly lost our nature of being kind and empathetic. As it turned out, this feeling and ability to be happy for others and to sympathize with others’ grief has died out.
Nonetheless, like language, empathy has its own words and grammar and can be taught and promoted through experiences and learning, as well as it can be practiced. While some people are naturally viewed as more empathetic than others, there are actually exercises and steps that might probably help anyone develop empathy.

For a more comprehensive view, empathy is defined as the understanding of others’ feeling and being compassionate toward them. According to Sara D. Hodges - Associate Professor of Psychology, and Michael W. Myers, Professor emeritus in the school of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs - there are two types of empathy. In social psychology, empathy can be classified as an emotional or cognitive response. Emotional empathy can be divided into three components. “The first is feeling the same emotion as another person … The second component, personal distress, refers to one’s own feelings of distress in response to perceiving another’s plight … The third emotional component, feeling compassion for another person, is the one most frequently associated with the study of empathy in psychology”, Hodges and Myers explain. The second type of empathy is cognitive empathy, which refers to the “how and why” of one perceives and understands well the emotions of others via the cognitive center. It refers tothe “how and why” others feel that way and how one can be helpful to them. Cognitive empathy, also known as empathic accuracy, involves “having more complete and accurate knowledge about the contents of another person’s mind, including how the person feels”, Hodges and Myers say.

Dona Matthews – a developmental psychologist – explained it separately in her article published on Psychology Today. According to Dona Matthews, there are three kinds of empathy: “cognitive, emotional and compassionate empathy”. Cognitive empathy as she also called perspective-taking when talking about the fact of being able to put oneself into someone else’s place and see their perspective by thought not by feeling. Emotional empathy or emotional contagion, an individual driven by emotional empathy understands other people’s emotions and expresses a strong and deep feeling toward them. Compassionate empathy also called empathic concern occurs when someone feels someone else’s pain and sympathizes along with an additional move towards action to resolve the problem.

Sources: Psychology today/ Encyclopedia of Social Psychology