 Affective and proper Empathy: More narrowly and properly understood, empathy in the affective sense is the vicarious sharing of an affect. Authors however differ in how strictly they interpret the phrase of vicariously sharing an affect. For some, it requires that the empathizers and the persons they empathize with need to be in very similar affective states (Coplan 2011; de Vignemont and Singer 2006; Jacob 2011). For Hoffman, on the other hand, it is an emotional response requiring only “the involvement of psychological processes that make a person have feelings that are more congruent with another’s situation than with his own situation” (Hoffman 2000, 30). 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). Rather the definition also includes cases of feeling sad when seeing a child who plays joyfully but who does not know that it has been diagnosed with a serious illness (assuming that this is how the other person himself or herself would feel if he or she would fully understand his or her situation). In contrast to mere emotional contagion, genuine empathy presupposes the ability to differentiate between oneself and the other. It requires that one is minimally aware of the fact that one is having an emotional experience due to the perception of the other’s emotion, or more generally due to attending to his situation. In seeing a sad face of another and feeling sad oneself, such feeling of sadness should count as genuinely empathic only if one recognizes that in feeling sad one’s attention is still focused on the other and that it is not an appropriate reaction to aspects of one’s own life. Moreover, empathy outside the realm of a direct perceptual encounter involves some appreciation of the other person’s emotion as an appropriate response to his or her situation. To be happy or unhappy because one’s child is happy or sad should not count necessarily as an empathic emotion. It cannot count as a vicarious emotional response if it is due to the perception of the outside world from the perspective of the observer and her desire that her children should be happy. My happiness about my child being happy would therefore not be an emotional state that is more congruent to his situation. Rather, it is an emotional response appropriate to my own perspective on the world. In order for my happiness or unhappiness to be genuinely empathic it has to be happiness or unhappiness about what makes the other person happy. Accordingly, if I share another person’s emotion vicariously I do not merely have to be in an affective state with a similar phenomenal quality. Rather my affective state has to be directed toward the same intentional object. (See Sober and Wilson 1998, 231–237 and Maibom 2007. For a critical discussion of how and whether such vicarious sharing is possible see also Deonna 2007 and Matravers 2018). It should be noted, however, that some authors conceive of proper empathy more broadly as not merely being concerned with the vicarious reenactment of affective states but more comprehensively as including non-affective states such as beliefs and desires. This is especially true if they are influenced by the discussion of of empathy as an epistemic means such as Goldman (2011) and Stueber (2006). However, already Adam Smith (1853) constitutes a good example for such broad understanding of proper empathy. Finally, others suggest that it is best to distinguish between affective sharing and perspective taking (Decety and Cowell 2015). 