An imaginative-associative account of affective empathy

This chapter brings the philosophy of emotion to bear on the psychological notion of ‘affective empathy’, roughly defined as ‘the vicarious sharing of affect’ (Stueber 2013), with the aim of clarifying the causal processes that give rise to it. I examine the account of the psychologist Martin Hoffman (2000), and show that it amounts to an associative process. The familiar processes of mimicry (contagion) and role-taking (simulation)—often thought to be the basis of empathy—only comprise possible triggers for the proposed associative process, and will not cause affective empathy without it. Through this critical summary, I argue that any account of second-hand emotions must accommodate their singularity: only some people will affectively empathize with a person in a certain emotional situation, and each of those people often fail to empathize with another person in a similar situation on another occasion. This challenge, I claim, is inherited from the singularity of first-hand emotions: different people often emote differently facing the same circumstances and that the same person often reacts differently, or not at all, to similar situations on different occasions. I then propose an associative account that can meet this challenge, by turning to certain insights of Freud and Hume.