B. Identification of the Psychological Mediator

The definition of affective altruism I have just provided includes a behavioral component and a psychological component. Still, this psychological component, the intention to help another, does not identify the fundamental psychological mediator. By fundamental psychological mediator, I mean the process that gives rise to the intention and which cannot itself be psychologically reduced (though it may be reduced neurologically). This mediator, I contend, is empathy. "Empathy" has been used and defined in many different ways; I will try to choose one definition that is both unambiguous and concords with how the term is usually used. First, empathy must be differentiated from its synonym, "sympathy." In a historical review and an analysis of the distinction between these two concepts, Lauren Wisp (1986) defines sympathy as the "heightened awareness of the suffering of another person as something to be alleviated" (p. 318) and empathy as "attempt by one self-aware self to comprehend unjudgmentally the positive and negative experiences of another self" (p. 318). In short, sympathy is a way of relating to others while empathy is a way of knowing others' experiences. Others define empathy less cognitively and more emotionally. For example, Barnett (1987) defines empathy as the "vicarious experiencing of an emotion which is congruent with, but not necessarily identical to, the emotion another person is experiencing" (p. 146). Batson and Oleson (1991) define it similarly as "an other-oriented emotional response congruent with the perceived welfare of another person" (p. 63), the difference being that the response is to the other's perceived welfare rather than emotion, so that, for example, one can feel empathy for a person who is unconscious. Davis (1994) contends that one of the primary reasons empathy is defined so differently by different people is that the term is being used to denote two disparate processes, which can be called cognitive empathy and affective empathy. Wisp's definition is of cognitive empathy while Barnett's and Batson and Oleson's are of affective empathy. Cognitive empathy, as the name implies, requires more cognitive mechanisms than affective empathy. Specifically, it requires a theory of mind, knowledge that others have minds that are distinct from one's own, for which there is little evidence of its existence in human infants and any animals other than humans (summarized in Tomasello, 1997). Affective empathy, on the other hand, requires an affective mechanism by which the emotional state of one person causes another person to experience the same or a similar emotion. For clarity, I will not use the term "empathy" in isolation; rather, I will always precede it by either "cognitive" or "affective."