The research we just talked about takes empathy down a peg. We mirror the feelings of others, but this mirroring is limited: Empathic suffering is different from actual suffering. Empathy is also contingent on how one feels about an individual. It’s not always the case, then, that we feel empathy and thereby treat someone well. Instead, we often think that someone is worth treating kindly (because he or she treated us nicely in the past or is simply like us) and then we feel empathy. And finally, emotional empathy—the sort of empathy that we’re obsessing about here—can be usefully disentangled
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