The Empathy-Compassion Gap

Imagine yourself stepping into the clean, clinical environment of a neuroscience research lab, heartbeat quickening as you reflect on just how little you know about what will happen next. You are instructed to lie down on a stretcher near a hefty machine, before being thrust headfirst into the enclosed, dim, noisy world of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. As the hum of the machine fades into the background, footage from documentaries and news reports begins to play on a screen, each portraying challenging clips of adults and children in clear dis­tress—scenes that are real, raw, and jarringly intimate. Naturally, your heart aches as you witness the pain and suffering of others. Then you remember the researcher’s instructions—to try empa­thizing even more with those in the video—so you consciously try to feel with the distress you see.

So went the first of two fMRI sessions for participants in a pioneering scientific study led by Tania Singer and colleagues, in which participants were first trained in empathy for suffering and later in compassion.¹ After their compassion training, participants again underwent this fMRI procedure but with new video clips and different instructions—this time, to instead try gener­ating compassion for those they witnessed suffering. The study’s findings revealed a striking difference in the patterns of neural activation between the empathy and compassion conditions. Specifically, empathy led to activations in areas of the brain linked to pain and negative emotion, namely the anterior insula and anterior midcingulate cortex, whereas compassion led to activa­tions in the ventral striatum, pregenual anterior cingulate cortex, and medial orbitofrontal cortex—areas linked to reward, affilia­tion, and positive emotion. In other words, the study showed that empathy and compassion rely on distinct brain networks, each with a very different trajectory for how we feel, think, and respond when confronted with human suffering.

This study, alongside others that have since compared empathy and compassion, highlights what I have come to refer to as the empathy-compassion gap. To summarize this research and eluci­date this gap, consider the following figure:

The Empathy-Compassion Gap

Source: From Self-Care to We-Care: The New Science of Mindful Boundaries and Caring from an Undivided Heart by Jordan Quaglia. © 2025 by Jordan Quaglia. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

When faced with human suffering, both empathy and com­passion begin with empathic resonance—feeling with those who are suffering. Yet this shared beginning is already the peak point of similarity between these two care-related states. If empathy for suffering is not transformed into compassion, its continuation can easily spiral into empathic distress and a more individually self-oriented, dysregulated, personally detrimental, and socially dis­connected state.² On the other hand, compassion can readily change empathy into a more other-oriented, regulated, person­ally beneficial, and socially connected state. As illustrated, the gap between empathy and compassion widens with time, as each sends us on a divergent pathway of corresponding brain activa­tions and downstream effects on our thoughts, emotions, and actions. Ultimately, this widening gap reveals how, when compared to empathy, compassion is more strongly aligned with care for both oneself and others—with we-care.

From From Self-Care to We-Care: The New Science of Mindful Boundaries and Caring from an Undivided Heart by Jordan Quaglia. © 2025 by Jordan Quaglia. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.