What type of empathy involves understanding another's experiences and feelings?

Cognitive empathy is the type of empathy that involves understanding another person's experiences and feelings from their perspective. It allows a person to put themselves in someone else's shoes, grasping the emotions and thoughts that the other individual may be encountering. This form of empathy focuses more on the intellectual understanding of another’s emotional state, rather than just feeling the emotions oneself.

While emotional empathy centers more on the ability to feel what another person is feeling, cognitive empathy emphasizes the thought process behind understanding those experiences. Behavioral empathy, though not a widely recognized term in psychological literature, could refer to how one acts based on empathic understanding. Situational empathy would pertain to the contextual feelings related to specific circumstances and may not fully capture the nuanced awareness that cognitive empathy entails. Therefore, cognitive empathy is the most accurate description of understanding another's experiences and feelings intellectually.