What Are the Four A’s of Empathy?
There is a framework literally called “the four A’s of empathy,” but it’s worth knowing upfront that most people who search this phrase are actually thinking of a different, more widely cited model that isn’t structured around the letter A at all. Both are covered here so you land on the one you actually need.
Quick answer: The literal four A’s, Ask, Attune, Acknowledge, and Affirm, come from a pastoral counseling framework. The model most therapists, researchers, and leadership trainers actually cite is nursing scholar Theresa Wiseman’s four attributes of empathy: perspective-taking, staying out of judgment, recognizing emotion, and communicating that understanding.
The Literal Four A’s: Ask, Attune, Acknowledge, Affirm
This version comes from Bill Gaultiere of Soul Shepherding, a pastoral counseling and leadership ministry, adapted from a small-group leader’s guide. It’s structured as four sequential steps for offering empathy in a conversation:
- Ask to Talk: Open with curious, open-ended questions, “What would you like to share?” or “How are you feeling?” rather than assuming you already know.
- Attune to Emotions: Reflect back what you’re hearing using feeling words: “It seems like you’re feeling frustrated,” rather than jumping to advice.
- Acknowledge Significance: Validate the weight of what the person is carrying: “This situation is really painful for you.”
- Affirm Strengths: Once you’ve empathized with the struggle, name something you genuinely admire: “I admire your honesty in sharing this.”
It’s a practical, easy-to-remember script, particularly suited to peer support, mentoring, or pastoral conversations where the goal is a single supportive exchange.
The Framework You’re Probably Actually Thinking Of
If you encountered “the four A’s” secondhand, in a workplace training, a therapy session, or a leadership book, there’s a good chance what you actually heard was “the four attributes of empathy,” a phrase that gets shortened to “the four A’s” simply because the word “attributes” starts with A, not because each individual item does.
This model comes from nursing scholar Theresa Wiseman, who identified it in a 1996 concept analysis of empathy published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing, and it was later popularized well beyond nursing through Brené Brown’s widely viewed animated talk on empathy versus sympathy. The four attributes are:
- Perspective-taking: Seeing the situation through the other person’s eyes, including accepting their perspective as valid, even if you’d see it differently yourself.
- Staying out of judgment: Setting aside evaluation of whether their reaction is “right” or “too much,” which is harder than it sounds, since judgment is often a way of protecting ourselves from someone else’s pain.
- Recognizing emotion in other people: Noticing what someone else might be feeling, which requires being reasonably in touch with your own emotions first.
- Communicating that understanding: Actually saying what you’ve noticed, “That sounds really hard,” rather than assuming the other person can tell you understand.
This is the model with real staying power in therapy, nursing, education, and leadership contexts, because it’s grounded in a formal concept analysis rather than a single practitioner’s framework, and it’s been independently cited and taught for nearly three decades.
Which One Should You Use?
If you’re looking for something research-grounded to teach, train, or write about, Wiseman’s four attributes is the stronger choice. It’s the version with an actual academic citation trail and decades of use across nursing, psychology, and leadership development. If you’re looking for a simple conversational script for a specific supportive conversation, particularly in a mentoring, small-group, or pastoral context, Gaultiere’s four A’s works well precisely because it’s sequential and easy to remember in the moment.
The Common Thread
Different letters, different origins, but the same underlying idea: empathy isn’t one action, it’s a small sequence of them, noticing, understanding, and then actually communicating that understanding back. That sequence is trainable, which is exactly the premise behind how Empathable builds empathy skills through practice rather than a single explanation.