Empathic concern: definition and example

Empathic concern is feeling warmth, tenderness, and concern for another person who is struggling, with your attention on their well-being rather than your own discomfort. It is the part of empathy most closely tied to wanting to help.

Editorially checked 2026-10-26

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By EQTiger Editorial. Review status: needs-expert-review. Qualified review is pending; the date records an editorial check.

Where the term comes from

Davis's Interpersonal Reactivity Index splits empathy into four parts: perspective taking, fantasy, empathic concern, and personal distress. In 1,344 undergraduates, the parts related to other measures in different ways; personal distress, for instance, went with lower self-esteem and poorer social functioning (Davis, 1983). Empathic concern is the "I feel for you" part; personal distress is the "this is upsetting me" part.

Concern versus distress

The distinction echoes a review that separates compassion, which is other-focused and linked to helping, from empathic distress, which is self-focused and linked to withdrawal (Singer and Klimecki, 2014). Both start from noticing pain. They differ in where your attention ends up.

An example

A coworker gets a call that her father is in the hospital. Personal distress might look like hovering anxiously and saying, "Oh no, this is terrible, I would be falling apart." Empathic concern might look like, "Go. I will cover your 2 o'clock and tell Sam. Text me if you need anything." The second keeps the focus on what she needs.

How to stay on the concern side

When someone's pain starts to feel like your own emergency, shift from your reaction to their needs with a question: "What would help most right now?" Practical help, a short check-in text the next day, and protecting your own rest all keep concern going longer than intense worry does.

Related terms

See affective empathy, cognitive empathy, and the compassion page for a fuller look at the feeling itself.

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Research notes

Mark H. Davis (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113-126. Validates the Interpersonal Reactivity Index's four subscales (perspective taking, fantasy, empathic concern, personal distress) in 1,344 undergraduates, finding them related to other measures in distinct ways, for example personal distress with low self-esteem and poorer interpersonal functioning. Limits: self-report; student sample. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.44.1.113
Tania Singer, Olga M. Klimecki (2014). Empathy and compassion. Current Biology, 24(18), R875-R878. A review that separates two reactions to someone else's suffering: empathic distress, a self-focused negative state linked to withdrawal, and compassion, a warm, other-focused state linked to wanting to help, and it describes early evidence that compassion can be trained. doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.06.054

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