The difference between sympathy and empathy
Of the two words, empathy is the more recent entry into the English language. Sympathy was in use for almost 300 years before empathy’s first written record in the nineteenth century. You might notice that both words contain -pathy, and that’s what makes them sort of similar – they share the same Greek root word pathos, which means “feelings” or “emotion,” but also “suffering” or “calamity.” But while both words deal with emotions, they are still very far from being synonyms.
What is empathy? The Greek phrase that lends empathy its meaning is “passion from feelings or emotion.” Most people know empathy has to do with understanding and sharing the experiences, feelings, and emotions of another person. However, empathy can also refer to using imagination to ascribe your feelings or attitudes to an object, such as a painting or a natural object.
What is sympathy? Sympathy derives from Greek words meaning “with feeling.” The word is most commonly used to describe the way we share someone else’s feelings, especially feelings of sorrow or trouble. Hence, greeting cards given to mourning families are called sympathy cards. Sympathy can also refer to the sense of harmony between people with the same tastes, disposition, or opinions. When a person feels sympathy toward a cause or an organization, he has feelings of approval, loyalty, or support.
“Empathy” vs “Sympathy”: Which Word To Use And When
The terms empathy and sympathy are often confused, and with good reason. Both of the words deal with the relationship a person has to the feelings and experiences of another person. One involves feeling a certain way about a person, and the other involves feeling the same way that another person does.
What is the difference between sympathy and empathy?
Both sympathy and empathy have roots in the Greek term páthos meaning “suffering, feeling.” Sympathy is the older of the two terms. It entered English in the mid-1500s with a very broad meaning of “agreement or harmony in qualities between things or people.” Since then, the term has come to be used in a more specific way.
Nowadays, sympathy is largely used to convey commiseration, pity, or feelings of sorrow for someone else who is experiencing misfortune. This sense is often seen in the category of greeting cards labeled “sympathy” that specialize in messages of support and sorrow for others in a time of need. You feel bad for them … but you don’t know what it is like to be in their shoes.
What's the difference between 'empathy'? & 'sympathy'
Though the words appear in similar contexts, they have different meanings.
Sympathy is a feeling of sincere concern for someone who is experiencing something difficult or painful. Empathy involves actively sharing in the person’s emotional experience.
Sympathy and empathy both involve feelings of concern for someone, but empathy goes beyond a feeling of concern to include an active sharing in the suffering person’s emotional experience.
Difference Between Empathy & Sympathy - what about Compassion?
Empathy and Sympathy are two closely related but distinct emotions. Sympathy involves feeling sorry or pity for someone, whereas empathy involves understanding and sharing someone’s feelings. Sympathy is more of an external expression of emotion, while empathy is an internal emotional response.
Simply put, sympathy is feeling for someone, while empathy is feeling with someone. Understanding the difference between these two emotions can help us communicate and connect with others on a deeper level. The words sympathy, empathy, and compassion are closely related terms that are often used interchangeably.
However, they are different. The definitions of these terms often demonstrate different aspects of intersubjective experience:
- Empathy is the ability to intimately feel and see another’s suffering, not just through understanding what they are going through but by being able to put themselves in another’s shoes. When expressing empathy, a person may use their personal experience to relate to another’s suffering.
- Sympathy is an emotion experienced in reaction to something that happens to others. When someone understands what another person is going through and feels sorrow or pity toward them, this is sympathy.
- Compassion means ‘to suffer together,’ which is an expression of caring and warmth. Someone who expresses compassion recognizes the pain in another person and is motivated to help them.
How does sympathy differ from empathy? And what about compassion?
When a friend is suffering from some misfortune, loss, or stressful experience, we want to be able to commiserate in a way that is both helpful and supportive. Whether it’s a physical problem, like a health issue, or an emotional problem, like a breakup from a romantic partner, how do we respond in a way that emanates warmth and understanding? Do we offer sympathy or empathy?
What's Empathy? Empathy and sympathy are similar, yet they differ in how they can make one who is suffering feel. Empathy is a sense that you can understand and share the feelings of another. This "shared" experience can generate a profound understanding because you attempt to know what it’s like to “walk in their shoes.” What's Sympathy? Sympathy is a feeling of pity or sorrow for someone else's misfortune. Sympathy may not be received as well as empathy, but sorrowful sympathy can offer some warmth and support in the face of someone else’s misfortune—if administered with sensitivity and sincerity.
What About Compassion? Compassion is more of an attitude, a way of thinking—it's a tendency to care for others and humanity, even from a distance. Compassion may reach further than a single individual potentially to masses of people with a particular ailment, experience, or hardship. Although compassion is generally good for us and others, health workers, nurses, and other service personnel can sometimes suffer compassion fatigue because caring for others, emotionally or physically, can be exhausting. And this can hurt their well-being.
Empathy
Empathy is generally described as the ability to take on other's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience. There are more (sometimes conflicting) definitions of empathy that include but are not limited to social, cognitive, and emotional processes primarily concerned with understanding others.
Often times, empathy is considered to be a broad term and broken down into more specific concepts and types that include cognitive empathy, emotional (or affective) empathy, somatic empathy, and spiritual empathy. Empathy is still a topic of research. The major areas of research include the development of empathy, the genetics and neuroscience of empathy, cross-species empathy, and the impairment of empathy. Some researchers have made efforts to quantify empathy through different methods, such as from questionnaires where participants can fill out and then be scored on their answers.
The English word empathy is derived from the Ancient Greek ἐμπάθεια (empatheia, meaning "physical affection or passion"). That word derives from ἐν (en, "in, at") and πάθος (pathos, "passion" or "suffering"). Theodor Lipps adapted the German aesthetic term Einfühlung ("feeling into") to psychology in 1903 and Edward B. Titchener translated Einfühlung into English as "empathy" in 1909. In modern Greek εμπάθεια may mean, depending on context, prejudice, malevolence, malice, or hatred.
Sympathy
Sympathy is the perception of, understanding of, and reaction to the distress or need of another life form.
According to philosopher David Hume, this sympathetic concern is driven by a switch in viewpoint from a personal perspective to the perspective of another group or individual who is in need. Hume explained that this is the case because "the minds of all men are similar in their feelings and operations" and that "the motion of one communicates itself to the rest" so that as "affections readily pass from one person to another… they beget correspondent movements."
Along with Hume, two other men, Adam Smith and Arthur Schopenhauer, worked to better define sympathy. Hume was mostly known for epistemology, Smith was known for his economic theory, and Schopenhauer for the philosophy of the will. American professor Brené Brown views sympathy as a way to stay out of touch with one's emotions. They attempt to make sense out of the situation and see it from the person receiving the sympathy's perception.
Compassion
Compassion is a social feeling that motivates people to go out of their way to relieve the physical, mental, or emotional pains of others and themselves. Compassion is sensitivity to the emotional aspects of the suffering of others. When based on notions such as fairness, justice, and interdependence, it may be considered partially rational in nature.
Compassion involves "feeling for another" and is a precursor to empathy, the "feeling as another" capacity (as opposed to sympathy, the "feeling towards another"). In common parlance, active compassion is the desire to alleviate another's suffering.
Compassion involves allowing ourselves to be moved by suffering to help alleviate and prevent it. An act of compassion is one that is intended to be helpful. Other virtues that harmonize with compassion include patience, wisdom, kindness, perseverance, warmth, and resolve. It is often, though not inevitably, the key component in altruism. The difference between sympathy and compassion is that the former responds to others' suffering with sorrow and concern whereas the latter responds with warmth and care. An article in Clinical Psychology Review suggests that "compassion consists of three facets: noticing, feeling, and responding".
