**3. Empathy**

The empathy, ability to share and understand emotional states of others, is defined as the process through which an individual understands the emotions of others by generating an isomorphic affective state and knowing that the cause of one's emotional state belong to the other person [45–49].

Empathic process does not mean to become like the other (i.e., think like him) but to be with the other, trying to fully understand the subjective experience of another person, from his point of view without assuming it as his own. Entering into resonance with the emotional state of another individual undoubtedly leads to a strong bond for sharing experiences and thoughts. Being able to understand the mind and emotional states of our conspecifics is fundamental to life, contributes to the success of social relationships because it allows us to communicate, understand and predict the behaviors and reactions of others. This ability to resonance within others' feelings allows a better understanding and the ability to promote prosocial behaviors [50].

Edith Stein, a student of Husserl, addressed the theme of empathy in a phenomenological point of view, trying to outline the characteristics of the human subject from his inter-subjectivity and relationship with other people [51].

According to researchers [45, 46], it is important to distinguish empathy from the theory of mind, sympathy or compassion and emotional contagion: (1) emotional contagion: the precursor of empathy cannot be considered as an empathic response as it does not involve emotions, but merely physiological responses to the emotional state expressed by another person (i.e., pupil dilation); (2) empathy: the ability to understand/participate in the feelings of others; (3) theory of mind: the ability of a person to represent the mental states of others including the affective ones; (4) compassion: ability to experience feelings but not necessarily the same as being tried by another person.

Summarizing the concept of empathy is considered a multidimensional construct that represents an emotional aspect composed of two main components: *affective empathy*, ability to experience and share the emotions of others, and a cognitive trait, *cognitive empathy*, ability to understand the emotions of others. Both of them can coexist in the empathic process. Haviland and Lelwica [52] have showed behavioral evidences during ontogenetic development that demonstrated how the affective component of empathy develop before that cognitive, because for adaptive questions can be very important to experience feelings and emotions as information about what others feel [52–56].

Researchers [58, 59] described as higher level of affective empathy (i.e., share an emotional state) can predict constructive conflict resolution when encountering problems with friends and cognitive empathy (i.e., understanding emotional states of others) can predict higher reciprocity and stability in social relationships with friends. A very interesting aspect is that if it is present only cognitive empathy without the affective component can predict higher levels of bullying [60]. The lack of empathy can cause the development of problematic interpersonal behaviors.

In addition, several studies [5, 60] showed bullying intervention programs that have incorporated empathy concept as an essential element, reduce bullying behaviors in the classroom. Overall, empathy is important for preventing bullying.
