High-level empathy is an imaginative process that results in feeling what another person feels. Additionally, through high-level empathy, one imagines herself in the target’s shoes, understanding the reasons behind her actions while retaining her own mental states. In contrast, mimicry is an unconscious and involuntary process in which the observer shares the target’s affective state without maintaining her own mental states. Philosophers are more concerned with intellectual accounts of high-level empathy, maintaining a dichotomy between mimicry and high-level empathy. However, a blossoming number of psychological studies demonstrate how mimicry might develop through experience, thus underlying high-level empathy. Incorporating experience into a more complex account of empathy may serve as a starting point for investigating a link between the two types of empathy. My hypothesis is that one cannot empathize with another without having experienced a similar affective state to that person. The present thesis investigates the necessity of the inclusion of affective experience in the account of high-level empathy, demonstrating why an account without the component of experience is incomplete for empathizing with another.
Undergraduate Dissertation
The Importance of Experience in High-Level Empathy
