ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the multi-faceted nature of empathy as a psychological concept, including affective components of emotional contagion and cognitive components that link with Theory of Mind. It introduces a wide range of tasks and measures that have been used to examine empathy in human participants, and critically appraised their limitations and potential. Empathy is a multidimensional construct that has attracted a great deal of research over many decades, but no single agreed-upon definition of empathy exists, even within psychology as a unitary discipline. Indeed, different researchers in the field use various terms to refer to similar concepts, and the same terms to refer to distinct concepts. In general, empathy has been used as an umbrella term for processes contributing to sharing and understanding the affective state of another person. The chapter reviews some of the most common methods with which empathy has been measured in psychological research.
