empath n.

‘How exactly does the government use empaths?’ Tim shrugged. ‘We can tell the level of a man’s loyalty just by meeting him. We can walk around a factory and sense that there’s going to be a strike.’

Irony: the compulsive empath overloaded and burned out by a compulsive sender who’d been bottled up.

Prilicla, he realised uncomfortably, was an empath. The being had not said very much since they had met a short time ago, but everything that it had said had backed up Conway’s feelings in the particular matter under discussion. His new assistant was not a telepath—it could not read thoughts—but it was sensitive to feelings and would therefore have been aware of Conway’s curiosity.

That was Eddie Burma’s problem. He was an empath. He felt. Deep inside himself, on a level most people never even know exists, he felt for the world.

Mr Osden, being an empath, feels it. Feels his feelings, and yours, and is hard put to say which is which.

We are both agreed that she is a broadcasting empath?

The empath nearly shriveled up into a ball.

Deanna’s no mind reader. She’s an empath. She senses moods, emotions, feelings.

'Cats rated a point-eight-three on the sentience scale, slightly above Beowulf’s gremlins or Old Earth’s dolphins, and they were empaths. Even now, no one had any idea how the empathic links worked, but separating one from its chosen companion caused it intense pain, and it had been established early on that those favored by a 'cat were measurably more stable than those without.

The novella ‘Need’ (1960) is one of the best of his psi -stories, but it is also one of the most harrowing; here the possession of a superhuman sensitivity becomes an alienating force in its own right, and the self-knowledge which the protagonist gains by virtue of his association with the empath is coldly unflattering.

There are no telepaths in this universe, I think, but there are empathies, with languages so silent that they may as well be sharing thoughts. The Hosts are not like that. They’re empaths of another kind. ... Their language is organised noise, like all of ours are, but for them each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen.