Authors: Jared Piazza, Stefan Leach, Joanna Burchell, Ffion Lloyd, Kiera Strenkowski, and Imogen Warhurst (2026)
What’s the article about? (At a glance)
Background: Empathy is what enables us to connect with the inner lives of others. Traditionally, empathy has been conceptualised as the state of feeling what another person is feeling – what psychologists sometimes refer to as “affective empathy”. However, to effectively empathise with others, we also need perspective taking – that is, the capacity to infer what others might reasonably be feeling or thinking – otherwise known as “cognitive empathy”.
Affective and cognitive empathy often combine to motivate prosocial action. Thus, for example, you might comfort your partner about missing your dinner date, but first you must appreciate your partner’s perspective (cognitive empathy: “I believe she was really looking forward to our date”), and it also might help to feel a little of what your partner may be feeling (affective empathy: “I can sense how sad she is, as I would be – I should go comfort her”).
The same is likely true when it comes to our relationship with animals. To intervene on behalf of animals who suffer, we need good mental-state inferences – e.g., “I bet pigs kept in gestation crates experience discomfort and frustration”. But it is also likely that people who suffer with animals may be more inclined to do something about it.
New research by Piazza et al. (2026), recently published in PHAIR, developed a new measure for independently assessing these two components of empathy across a range of human-animal contexts. The central aim of the research was to develop a reliable instrument for measuring people’s tendencies to experience affective and cognitive empathy towards animals.
While there already exists a widely used measure of trait empathy towards animals – Elisabeth Paul’s (2000) Animal Empathy Scale – this scale does not discriminate between affective and cognitive components, nor does the scale separate prosocial action1 towards animals from empathy felt towards them. Thus, the scale conflates empathy with action, which is problematic for testing whether empathy motivates people to intervene on behalf of animals. Furthermore, Paul’s scale largely focuses on companion animals, which potentially limits the scope of its applicability.
Key findings: The authors conducted two studies with UK participants. Study 1 focused on developing items for the scale and exploring its factor structure. The Affective Empathy sub-scale emphasised mirroring animal emotions (e.g., “Seeing lobsters together in small tanks in a restaurant makes me feel claustrophobic as well”), whereas the Cognitive Empathy sub-scale emphasised perspective taking (e.g., “Monkeys used in sensory deprivation experiments must feel scared”). Study 2 confirmed the two-factor structure of the Affective and Cognitive Animal Empathy Scale (AC-AES), with 11 items per factor (see PHAIR’s Measures Library for the full scale and instructions).
Across the two studies, the authors found that:
- Individuals who tend to express affective empathy for humans also tend to express affective empathy towards animals – consistent with the General Empathy Hypothesis – see e.g., Paul (2000) and Taylor and Signal (2005).
- Consistent with the wider research on empathy, female participants tended to report more affective and cognitive empathy towards animals, relative to male participants.
- A tendency to experience affective empathy towards animals was associated with meat avoidance (pork, beef, and chicken), meat-alternative consumption, and meat-restricted diets. Cognitive empathy was less consistently related towards these eating-related variables.
- Both affective and cognitive empathic tendencies were related to endorsing non-lethal forms of wild animal management, belief in animal mind, lower levels of speciesism, greater solidarity with animals, and having more expansive circles of concern.
Implications for advocacy
The authors argue that their instrument allows for more nuanced assessments of the role that empathy plays in animal advocacy, as it allows researchers to isolate which aspect of empathy – feeling with animals or reasoning about their inner lives – might play the larger role in promoting actions that help animals. For example, sharing in the emotions of animals may motivate animal-product avoidance over and above simply reasoning about animal emotions. However, the authors are cautious that these results are preliminary and require further testing to replicate.
The authors also argue that the AC-AES carefully separates empathy (a psychological act) from prosocial behaviour. This allows researchers to test the predictive role of empathic tendencies on behaviours (e.g., volunteering for an animal charity, avoiding meat, etc.), rather than conflating empathy with behaviour. The benefit of doing this is that it allows empathy to be tested as one factor among many that could potentially motivate prosocial action for animals. Thus, arguably, future research will have a more accurate picture of how much attention to place on empathy, vis-à-vis other interventions, as a means to helping animals.
- “I would always try to help if I saw a dog or puppy that seemed to be lost” is an example item from Paul’s (2000) Animal Empathy Scale that measures prosocial action / intentions. ↩︎
Quick Links
The paper “Understanding Animal Minds and Mirroring their Emotions: Validation of the Affective and Cognitive Animal Empathy Scale (AC-AES)” was published in Volume 5 (2026) of the PHAIR journal.
To read the full, open-access paper, go here
Blog post by Jared Piazza for PHAIR
Cover photo by Yannis H
