Empathy

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The vampire Marcus could identify Angel's feelings and past by touching him

Empathy was the supernatural ability to sense the emotions of other beings. With this, empaths could gain information about the people they "read", by detecting current emotions, thoughts, emotional stages, goals, significant past loves and even the presence of soul.

Unlike telepathy, the ability to sense the thoughts of others, vampires were not immune to be "read" by empaths.

Known Empaths

• Vampires have shown to have some empathic abilities, though only limited to sensing the prescene of a soul. Some vampires, such as Drusilla and Marcus, appeared to be more in-depth with this ability as Drusilla could easily feel other's emotions in conjunction with her other physic abilities while Marcus could sense that Angel had a soul as well as knowing he'd been in love my looking at his bare chest.
• Empathic Demons, as their name idicated, could sense the emotion of other beings.
• Guardian of the Word could sense that Angel was a vampire.
• The Old One Illyria sense people's emotions along with distinquishing humans or non-human look-alikes and even sensing arousal.
• TheDeathwok Clan should sense people's 'auras' and primarily used this for hunting while Lorne instead could reading aura's when people sang. 
• Vengeance Demons used empathy to find their wronged person. They also could sense a person's soul. 
• Tara Maclay had the ability to 'read' auras, allowing her to sense that something was wrong with Buffy Summers' body when she was possessed by Faith Lehane. 
• Willow Rosenberg briefly gained the power of empathy when she sucked the magical energy of a Devon coven from Rupert Giles. This allowed her to feel the pain experienced by the rest of humanity.