If you hear your friend has lost a loved one or a neighbour’s car was stolen, what happens in your mind? Do you take on the pain of your friend or do you feel concern and compassion? A new study shows when it comes to evoking empathy, our imagination is more powerful than we previously thought.

Until now, research in empathy has largely focused on how imagining helping another person can promote compassion, but not on how imagining another person’s situation affects empathy, which is usually our first mental course of action.