This gets to the crux of the book's problem: Bloom's definition of empathy—"the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does". This definition doesn't jive with the common view of empathy, which is not just about resonating with others emotionally but more about understanding their emotions and viewpoints.
When Bloom takes on empathy in his book, he mainly uses Bill Clinton's definition of the term, not Hillary Clinton's.
Due to the complexity of the construct, empathy has various definitions (e.g., Preston and de Waal, 2002; Singer and Lamm, 2009; Walter, 2012), but most models differentiate between cognitive and affective empathy.
I think it's important to know your definition of empathy so you can better practice it yourself and ask for it from others.
According to this definition, empathy does not necessarily require that the subject and target feel similar emotions (even though this is most often the case).
Using this definition, empathy may be widespread among mammalian species [34].
Although most people would claim to be able to recognise empathy, there is no agreed definition.
In this article, we use the definition of empathy supplied by Preston & de Waal [8], in which empathy is a term for a broad category of resonant emotional responses comprising a continuum from basic forms, such as emotional contagion, to complex forms, such as cognitive empathy.
This is very like the definition of empathy, or its German origin word, einfühlung, "feeling our way into another".
My personal definition of empathy is an intelligent and egoless connection and understanding.
