Empathy, according to Merriam-Webster, is “the feeling that you understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions.”
Though empathy is something which is (generally) shared among humans, there has been some contention over whether or not other animals share this trait, and to what extent.
Recently, a study published in PeerJ explored
the empathy similarities between humans
and Bonobo monkeys.
Since cognitive empathy is far from quantitative, the researchers studied the most simplistic form of an emotional contagion: the yawn.