Cognitive Empathy
Understanding what another person thinks or feels by mentally taking their perspective, without necessarily feeling any of their emotion yourself.
Cognitive empathy is the "read" half of empathy — accurately inferring someone's mental and emotional state from their words, expression, and context. It relies on perspective-taking and is closely tied to theory of mind, the general ability to model that other people hold beliefs and feelings different from your own.
It is possible to have high cognitive empathy with low warmth: a good interrogator, negotiator, or even a manipulator can read people precisely without caring what happens to them. That is why the EQ model treats cognitive empathy as only one leg of social awareness — alongside emotional empathy and the caring response that turns accurate reading into support.
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