Abstract: Empathy for pain implies perception, judgment and affective response of the other’s pain. It is influenced by observers’ factors, objects’ factors and the relationships between them. Perception-Action Model, Pain Empathy Cognitive Model, Late Appraisal Model and Early Appraisal Model serve as the theoretical explanations for empathy for pain. Future research should explore the cognition mechanism, the emotional influencing factors and other research methods of empathy for pain.

Key words: empathy, empathy for pain, encode, decode, cognitive mechanism