Sensory processing sensitivity
A measurable temperament — estimated in Aron's work at roughly a fifth of people — involving deeper processing of stimuli and stronger emotional reactions.
The ordinary version is real, the distance version is not shown
Psychic empathy
Psychic empathy is the claimed ability of feeling other people's emotions directly, at a distance or without cues. Status: the ordinary version is real, the distance version is not shown.
The other claimed abilities put to the same test: medium, clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, clairsentience, clairaudience, psychometry, astral projection, healing and aura reading.
What people describe
People who describe themselves as empaths say they absorb other people's emotions as if they were their own, feel drained after social contact, sense lies or hidden distress, and need time alone to recover.
How it entered the record
The noun "empath" comes from mid-twentieth-century science fiction, where it described characters who could literally feel others' emotions, and later became a popular self-description. In 1996 the psychologist Elaine Aron described the "highly sensitive person", and her later research on sensory processing sensitivity gave a measurable trait that overlaps with much of what empaths report.
The experiment
Emotional contagion research — Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson, 1993 onward
How it was run
Participants are exposed to another person's expression, posture or voice and their own state is measured.
Sample
Large and replicated across decades
Result
Emotional contagion is real and well established. It works through ordinary perception — face, voice, posture, breathing — and disappears when those channels are removed.
This is the ability most worth separating carefully. People who describe themselves as empaths are usually describing something genuine and measurable. The disputed part is only whether it works without the senses.
Claim
Feeling other people's emotions directly, at a distance or without cues
Word from
Greek empatheia "in-feeling"
Status
The ordinary version is real, the distance version is not shown
Where the word comes from
The word entered English in 1909 as a translation of the German Einfühlung — from aesthetics, not from the occult.
What psychology offers instead
Emotional contagion
Everyone catches moods from others; some people do it more strongly and notice it more.
Accuracy versus confidence
Studies of empathic accuracy find that feeling sure you know someone's emotion and actually being right are only loosely related.
How to test it fairly yourself
Watch short video clips of people describing experiences, rate what they felt, and compare with what they reported feeling. Empathic accuracy can be measured, and it does not require any psychic explanation to be high.