empathy imaginative projection into another person’s situation, especially for vicarious capture of its emotional and motivational qualities. The term is an English rendering (by the Anglo- American psychologist E. G. Titchener, 1867– 1927) of the German Einfühlung, made popular by Theodore Lipps (1851–1914), which also covered imaginative identification with inanimate objects of aesthetic contemplation. Under ‘sympathy’, many aspects were earlier discussed by Hume, Adam Smith, and other Scottish philosophers. Empathy has been considered a precondition of ethical thinking and a major contributor to social bonding and altruism, mental state attribution, language use, and translation. The relevant spectrum of phenomena includes automatic and often subliminal motor mimicry of the expressions or manifestations of another’s real or feigned emotion, pain, or pleasure; emotional contagion, by which one ‘catches’ another’s apparent emotion, often unconsciously and without reference to its cause or ‘object’; conscious and unconscious mimicry of direction of gaze, with consequent transfer of attention from the other’s response to its cause; and conscious or unconscious role-taking, which reconstructs in imagination (with or without imagery) aspects of the other’s situation as the other ‘perceives’ it. See also EINFÜHLUNG , EMOTION , EXPRES- SION THEORY OF ART, HUME , PROBLEM OF OTHER MINDS , SIMULATION THEORY, SMITH , VERSTEHE. R.M.G.