Empatía: Desde la percepción automática hasta los procesos controlados

Abstract

Since its first use in Psychology at the beginning of the 20th century, the term Empathy has reached the different branches of the aforementioned science, leading to the spread of a number of theories and categories developed in order to explain its functioning or describe its components. In the present paper, some discussions about the scope and the limits of empathy are reviewed in an attempt to clarify the particularities and relations between distinct terms that coexist in the study of this topic: namely, Emotional Contagion, Emotional Empathy, Perspective Taking, Theory of Mind and Mentalizing. Furthermore, we propose an integration of this theoretical field into a broad scheme, in an attempt to account for the complexity of the construct of Empathy.