Empathy vs Sympathy
Empathy and Sympathy are relationships based on shared emotions and understanding. Empathy is understood as the ability to mutually experience the thoughts, emotions, and direct experience of others without them being directly communicated intentionally.
Sympathy is a feeling of care and understanding for suffering beings.
Both have similar usage but differ in their emotional meaning.
Comparison chart
| Improve this chart | Empathy | Sympathy |
|---|---|---|
| Scope: | Personal | From either one to another person or one to many (or one to a group or issue) |
| Easy Definition: | Identifying with or experiencing vicariously another's thought, feeling, or attitude. | Feel sorry for; Feel pity for; Feel bad for |
| Emotion: | Close bonded relationships | Care, Protection |
| Relative to: | Caring, Personal Growth | Wisdom, Charity |
| Example: | I can empathise with how aggrieved you must be at the loss of your beloved. | I offer my sympathy at the loss of your loved one. |
| Relationship: | Friends, Family, Community | Poor and less fortunate: may include disadvantaged members of friends, family and community |
| Definition: | The ability to co-experience and relate to the thoughts, emotions, or experience of another without them being communicated directly by the individual | The ability to understand and to support the emotional situation or experience of another being with compassion and sensitivity |
| Feeling: | An empath can consciously or unconsciously take on the illness, afflictions or emotions of another. | One can sympathize without "taking on" (or experiencing) what the other is going through or feeling. |
Contents |
edit Emotional differences between sympathy and empathy
Sympathy essentially implies a feeling of recognition of another's suffering while empathy is actually sharing another's suffering, if only briefly. Empathy is often characterized as the ability to "put oneself into another's shoes".
Empathy develops into an unspoken understanding and mutual decision making that is unquestioned, and forms the basis of tribal community. Sympathy may be positive or negative, in the sense that it attracts a perceived quality to a perceived self identity, or it gives love and assistance to the unfortunate and needy.
One feels empathy when one has "been there" and sympathy when one hasn't.
Empathy develops into an unspoken understanding and mutual agreement, and forms the basis of tribal community.
edit Origin of the words empathy and sympathy
Sympathy comes from Middle French sympathie, from Late Latin sympathia, from Ancient Greek συμπάθεια (sumpatheia), from σύν (sun, “with, together”) + πάθος (pathos, “suffering”).
The word 'empathy' is a twentieth-century borrowing of Ancient Greek ἐμπάθεια (empatheia, literally “passion”) (formed from ἐν (en-, “in, at”) + πάθος (pathos, “feeling”)), coined by Edward Bradford Titchener to translate German Einfühlung. The modern Greek word εμπάθεια has an opposite meaning denoting strong negative feelings and prejudice against someone.
edit Relation
Compassion can form a base for both empathy and sympathy, and each may be seen as aspects of wisdom, or the means through which wisdom is synthesized. Sympathy also involves caring, but a compassionate sense of assistance and protection for those who are poor and less fortunate. Empathy is expressed when trying to feel someone else’s feeling who generally is known to you.
edit Examples of empathy and sympathy
To quote an example here: A man goes to hear a lecture. He may hold the following opinions after the encore.
Empathy: "I understand the writer's empathetic study of the subject."
Sympathy: "I can only sympathize with the writer's total lack of knowledge."
It is possible to be empathetic and not sympathetic at the same time. For example: If a person gambles and loses all his money, you may feel empathetic and try to analyze the reason for doing so but you will not be sympathetic towards him as it is his fault entirely in losing the money. On the other hand, you can both empathize and sympathize at the same point. If someone loses a loved one to a disease, you will feel sympathy for them and, if you have ever lost a loved one yourself, you are likely to empathize with their position.
edit Empathy has a communication skill
Empathy can be employed as a communication skill. Empathy can allow great communicators to sense the emotions of an audience and is the mutual understanding and inspiration communicated to the audience. A lack of empathy involves a poor sense of communication that fails to understand the perspective of the audience. An audience may feel a positive or negative sympathy to both the communicator and the message as it is transmitted in communication. Empathy can also be found in the artist, musician, and drama, as well as the audience.
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