ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses empathy in terms of feeling. Perhaps the most common idea of empathy rests on the notion of identification, as evidenced by the students with numbing, albeit unreflective, regularity. For empathy-as-identification requires not only that the empath's feeling be caused by its subject but that his/her feeling be identical to object of his/her attention. The chapter uses the label "emotional contagion" since it has become standard way of referring to phenomenon. The phenomenon of emotional contagion seems likely to contribute to our empathetic response to paintings. A painting of battle may express feeling of confusion, without any of the depicted warriors expressing being confused. In the Goya painting, both relevant characters and viewers are in distress. The painting projects a coherent mood, one of anxiety, of being situated in a precarious place where every element broadcasts a sense of existential vulnerability, which the alternative title of the painting suggests is nothing less than the human condition.
