Empathy, however, has an evil twin, which I call “emotion monitoring.” This is the tendency to continually monitor the emotional states of others, while sacrificing attunement to one’s own emotional states. The difference between empathy and emotion monitoring is that empathy requires a clear external stimulus; it is a reaction to someone else’s situation. Emotion monitoring, on the other hand, is a constant, often subconscious, scanning or monitoring of others’ emotional states in order to anticipate any negative feelings they might experience. The goal is to know what they might be feeling so as to avoid making them uncomfortable. With emotion monitoring, there is a sense of anticipation, and because that anticipation is constant, one’s own emotion state gets neglected.