Influence of Psychological Closeness on Emotional Contagion: a focus on stress

6 CHAPTER 1 EMPATHY 1. Empathy: definitions and usefulness The term empathy comes from the Ancient Greek word "εμπαθεία" (empatéia) which is composed by en (in) and pathos (feeling). In Ancient Greece, it was used to indicate the emotional relationship that connected the cantor and his public, while in European languages it appeared for the first time with the German word Einfühlung, coined by R. Vischer to indicate the over-identification with nature and symbols that occurs when we are in front of an art work. Only later, translated in the English language as empathy, it began to indicate the resonance of feelings between human beings (Enciclopedia Treccani online; Singer and Klimecki, 2014). In Psychology, many researchers have focused their attention on what empathy is and how it works, but still, there is not a universally accepted definition (de Vignemont and Signer, 2006). Following Singer and Klimecki (2014), we can shortly define it as the capacity to share the feelings of others. Through empathy we can resonate with the positive or negative emotion that we observe or imagine in another individual, and, importantly, this resonance is associated with the awareness that the source of our affective state is the other. This means, for example, that we can feel happy simply because we share the joy of someone else, but we know that what we are experiencing is