Psychologists point out that defining empathy as the act of stepping into someone's mind to experience their feeling can lead to some tricky moral dilemmas.

In recent years, researchers have found that misplaced empathy can lead to exhaustion and apathy, and prevent you from helping the people who need you.

We naturally have more empathy for people closer to us. Our empathy and affinity for others decline the further people are from us.

The German word for empathy is "Einfühlung" and was coined in the late 1800s. It means "feeling into."

While shared happiness is a very pleasant state, sharing someone's suffering, such as a loved one, can be very difficult.