Abstract: Empathy is a kind of ability which individual understand others’ emotion and make proper response. It make us to interact effectively in the social world, acting as the “glue”of the social world, drawing us to help others and stopping us from hurting others. Empathic responses refer to emotional responses and helpful response in the process of empathy. From the dual angle of individual tendency and situation, the present article explored the effects of empathic abilities on empathic reactions in different situations. The experiment used IRI—C scale, empathic responses questionnaire and story tapes as experimental material, employed a three-factor mixed design, as follows ( empathic ability: high versus low ) ×(situation arrangement: high versus low reality) ×(sex: male versus female), with empathic ability and sex as the between-subject, situation as the within- subject independent variable, empathic responses as dependent variable. 100 undergraduates as subjects, including 48 male and 52 female students, divided into two equal groups according to the score of empathy scale ( IRI—C) , group 1 and group 2. Each group included 25 high empathic ability and 25 low empathic ability , 24 male and 26 female subjects. Through the instruction to control the high and low reality situations before listening story tapes, group 1 and 2 listened different instructions. That is group 1 in high reality situation, group 2 in low reality situation. After listening story, subjects were asked to finish empathic responses questionnaire. The results showed: (1) empathic abilities had great effects on empathic responses. There were great difference between low and high empathic ability score (p? .001). (2) there were no significant difference between low and high reality situation . (3) on some concrete empathic responses, interaction of empathic abilities and situation was significant, such as distress in emotional responses, helpful intention in helpful response(p? .05). (4) there were no significant difference on empathic responses between male and female. These results indicated empathy acting as one type of ability, having certain individual tendentiousness, It has a certain stability. At the same time , empathy can be affected by different variety of situations. Though in this study, low and high reality situations had no obvious effects on empathic responses, but empathy shows the interaction with situation. Thus, empathic responses are the combination of individual tendency and situation.