Lack of empathy is a reduced or absent ability to sense, share, or understand other people’s emotions. It can show up as difficulty reading social cues, seeming indifferent to someone’s pain, or consistently failing to consider how your actions affect others. Everyone has moments of low empathy, especially under stress or exhaustion, but a persistent pattern can strain relationships, isolate you socially, and sometimes signal an underlying condition.
To understand what’s missing when empathy is low, it helps to know what empathy actually involves and the different forms it takes.
The Three Types of Empathy
Empathy isn’t a single skill. Psychologists break it into at least three distinct processes, and a person can be strong in one while struggling with another.
- Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand someone else’s perspective, sometimes called “perspective-taking.” You can mentally step into another person’s situation and grasp how they think and feel, even if you don’t feel it yourself.
- Emotional empathy is actually feeling what another person feels. When a friend cries and your own chest tightens, that’s emotional empathy at work. Your brain’s mirror neurons can trigger this response automatically when you witness someone in pain.
- Somatic empathy is a physical reaction to someone else’s experience. Watching someone get embarrassed might make you blush or feel queasy, even though nothing happened to you directly.
A person who lacks empathy might be missing one type, two, or all three. Someone with strong cognitive empathy but weak emotional empathy can intellectually recognize that you’re upset without feeling any emotional pull to comfort you. This combination is actually common in certain personality disorders, where a person reads social situations accurately but isn’t moved by what they observe.
How It Differs From Sympathy and Compassion
People often use empathy, sympathy, and compassion interchangeably, but they describe different experiences. Empathy means you feel what another person feels. Sympathy means you understand what they feel without sharing the sensation yourself. Compassion goes a step further: you recognize suffering and are motivated to do something about it.
This distinction matters because someone who lacks empathy isn’t necessarily incapable of compassion. Research shows that compassion and empathy activate different regions of the brain, and practicing compassion can actually help counteract the distress that sometimes comes with absorbing other people’s pain. A person who struggles to feel others’ emotions instinctively may still choose to act with kindness once they cognitively recognize that someone is hurting.
Signs of Low Empathy
Lack of empathy rarely announces itself. It tends to show up in patterns of behavior that others notice before the person themselves does. Common signs include:
- Difficulty reading facial expressions, tone of voice, or body language
- Rarely or never showing concern when someone is hurt or distressed
- Dismissing other people’s feelings as overreactions
- Struggling to maintain close friendships or romantic relationships
- Intense emotional outbursts that seem disconnected from the situation
- Laughing at others’ pain or seeming entertained by it
- Being described as “cold,” “selfish,” or “checked out” by multiple people
In children and teens, the signs can look slightly different. A young person with empathy difficulties might hurt animals, withdraw socially, show little emotional reaction to situations that clearly affect their peers, or have sudden behavioral changes. When empathy issues appear alongside angry outbursts, defiance, obsessive behaviors, or fascination with violent content, that combination is more concerning than any single sign alone.
What Causes It
Childhood Environment
Empathy is partly learned. Children develop it through secure relationships with caregivers who consistently respond to their emotional needs. When that process is disrupted, particularly through emotional neglect, the effects can be measurable and long-lasting.
Childhood emotional neglect, where a caregiver fails to provide basic love, belonging, and emotional support, can alter the trajectory of brain development during adolescence and affect social functioning well into adulthood. Children who experience emotional neglect often develop insecure attachment styles, suppressed emotional responses to others, and difficulty regulating their own emotions. All of these erode the foundation empathy is built on.
Brain imaging research has found that adults who experienced neglect as children show altered connectivity between the prefrontal cortex (involved in reasoning and regulation) and the amygdala (involved in emotional processing). This disrupted wiring can make it physically harder to process and respond to other people’s emotions, not just psychologically harder.
Mental Health and Personality Conditions
Several clinical conditions involve empathy deficits as a core feature:
Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is characterized by self-absorption, grandiosity, and a marked lack of empathy. People with NPD can often read others’ emotions quite well (their cognitive empathy may be intact) but use that understanding to manipulate rather than connect.
Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) involves a more severe disruption. Rather than simply being indifferent to others’ suffering, some people with ASPD experience what researchers call “contrast empathy,” feeling pleasure or satisfaction in situations that would normally trigger concern or compassion in others.
Depression, burnout, and chronic stress can also suppress empathy temporarily. When your own emotional resources are depleted, the brain has less capacity to process other people’s feelings. This type of empathy loss is typically reversible once the underlying condition improves.
Neurodivergence and the Double Empathy Problem
Autism has long been associated with empathy deficits, but this framing is increasingly recognized as incomplete and misleading. The Empathy Quotient, a 40-item questionnaire used in clinical settings, uses a score of 30 as the threshold for distinguishing between autistic and neurotypical individuals. About 80% of autistic adults score at or below that cutoff, while only 12% of neurotypical adults do.
Those numbers seem to support the idea that autistic people lack empathy, but newer research tells a more nuanced story. The Double Empathy Problem, a framework gaining traction in psychiatry, reframes the issue: communication breakdowns happen between autistic and non-autistic people, not solely within the autistic person. Studies show that two autistic people communicating with each other do so effectively, as do two non-autistic people. The difficulty arises when the two groups try to communicate across neurotypes. In other words, the “empathy deficit” runs in both directions. Non-autistic people are equally poor at reading autistic people’s emotions and intentions.
Many autistic people actually experience intense emotional empathy, sometimes overwhelmingly so. What they may struggle with is cognitive empathy: interpreting facial expressions, tone, or social conventions that neurotypical people take for granted. Conflating that with a lack of caring is a common and harmful misunderstanding.
How Empathy Is Measured
The most widely used clinical tool is the Empathy Quotient (EQ-40), a self-report questionnaire scored from 0 to 80. Scores fall into five ranges based on a normative sample of over 1,700 adults: extremely low (0 to 24, bottom 5th percentile), low (25 to 36), moderate (37 to 52, where most people fall), high (53 to 64), and extremely high (65 to 80, top 5th percentile).
These scores offer a useful snapshot, but self-report tools have obvious limitations. Someone with low empathy may not accurately judge their own empathic responses. Clinicians also use behavioral observation, structured interviews, and in research settings, brain imaging that tracks neural responses to others’ pain. No single test defines whether someone “has” or “lacks” empathy; it’s assessed as a spectrum, not a binary.
Can Empathy Be Developed?
For most people, yes. Empathy has a biological basis, but it’s also a skill that responds to practice. Cognitive empathy in particular can be strengthened deliberately. Actively imagining another person’s perspective, asking questions about how someone feels rather than assuming, and exposing yourself to stories and experiences outside your own all build the mental habit of perspective-taking over time.
Compassion-focused practices, including structured training programs, have been shown to activate different neural pathways than raw emotional empathy. This means people who find it overwhelming or impossible to feel others’ pain directly can still develop a compassionate response through a different cognitive route.
When empathy deficits are tied to personality disorders or significant childhood trauma, the path is harder and typically requires professional support. Therapy approaches that focus on mentalization (the ability to understand your own and others’ mental states) have shown particular promise. The process is slow, but the brain’s social circuitry remains more adaptable than early research suggested.
For people whose empathy has dropped because of burnout, stress, or depression, recovery often follows naturally as mental health improves. Prioritizing rest, reducing emotional overload, and re-engaging with close relationships can restore empathic capacity that was temporarily offline rather than permanently absent.