7mo ago

How does affective empathy work with anger?

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.

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7 comments

I will feel the person's anger more and more strongly as the distance between us decreases. The person doesn't need to outwardly show any sign of anger for me to feel it - they can appear perfectly calm but if they are angry, I'll feel it.
When I interact with people, I don't try to put myself in their shoes. I've known for many years that I can sense other people's strong emotions, so I mostly focus my awareness on how I'm feeling and use that as a sense. If how I'm feeling changes spontaneously (not caused by my mental focus, thoughts, or reaction) when I'm interacting with someone, I'll know that I'm sensing something from the other person.
My experience of other people's anger is different from when I feel angry. I experience other people's anger as a very uncomfortable sensation my abdomen and solar plexus. It's similar to when I feel angry but I'm more detached and I'm observing the uncomfortable sensation, which is mostly localized to my solar plexus. When I'm angry, my thoughts and emotions are fully engaged, my anger has a direction, and I feel it fully in my body. Like, "I'm experiencing anger vs I'm angry."
When I experience someone else's anger, it's not directed at the object of their anger - it's just a sensation.
So if someone is angry at me, I don't feel angry at myself - I just feel their anger being directed at me
The way I believe it works is through resonance. Have a look at this video that illustrates it with wine glasses: https://youtu.be/lTl0badhh8Y
People are like wine glasses that vibrate how they are feeling and if someone is capable of resonating with them, they begin to feel it too.
If my baseline feeling is far from anger (I'm feeling a strong positive emotion), I'll feel other people's negative emotions less, or not at all.

7 comments