Cognitive Empathy
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”
(Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird; Lee, 1960, p. 31).
Cognitive empathy is emotional contagion, together with contextual appraisal of the eliciting situation, and an understanding that the needs of another may be separate from one's own (de Waal, 2008).
As such, cognitive empathy is dependent on the highest cognitive abilities such as perspective taking and theory of mind. Although theory of mind encompasses a wide variety of abilities, in reference to empathy it is the recognition that others have thoughts, desires, and feelings that may differ to our own (Reber & Reber, 2001).
Throughout childhood, more advanced levels of emotion understanding gradually and predictably develop (Pons & Harris, 2005) with the greatest developmental growth occurring between the ages of five and six years (Ketelaars, van Weerdenburg, Verhoeven, Cuperus, & Jansonius, 2010). During this development a shift from self-oriented to social perspective occurs whereby an emotional state of the self, which is generated by perceiving another's situation, is now able to be attributed to the other instead of the self (de Waal, 2008).
A common research technique for gauging the presence of this ability is the mirror self-recognition test. If one is able to recognise that it is their own body reflected in a mirror, then they are thought to also have advanced empathy because self-recognition is an indicator of self-awareness, and the ability to infer mental states in others is a by-product of self-awareness (Gallup, 1982). Basic levels of emotion understanding, such as causal attributions of emotions have been found in children as young as three years of age (Brown & Dunn, 1996).
The relationship between mirror self-recognition and empathetic perspective-taking has been found in many studies (Bischof-Kohler, 1991; Johnson, 1982; Zahn-Waxler, Robinson, & Emde, 1992) and this relationship holds even when statistically controlling for age (Bischof-Kohler, 1991). Furthermore, the same regions of the brain that appear to correlate with self-recognition also appear crucial for making inferences about what other people are thinking (Gallup, Anderson, & Shillito, 2002).
