Empathic Effort

"We define empathic effort as a willingness to invest time or energy in feeling empathy, and we argue that people can modulate their empathy experience by amplifying the amount of effort they exert. For example, they might choose to spend more time with the target, ask questions or listen to the target to increase their understanding of the target’s emotions and perspective, or consciously try to put themselves in the target’s “shoes” so that they may come to share the target’s physiological or affective states." (Schumann et al. 2014)