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Sympathy is a stage in social and moral development. It typically arises when a child is between two and three years old, although some instances of empathic emotion can be seen as early as 18 months. Basic sharing of emotions, a precursor for sympathy, can be seen in infants.
Empathy and sympathy are often mixed up, but they're totally different emotions. A psychotherapist explains the key differences between the two reactions:
Empathic concern refers to other-oriented emotions elicited by, and congruent with the perceived welfare of, someone in need. [1] These other-oriented emotions include feelings of tenderness, sympathy, compassion and soft-heartedness. Empathic concern is often confused with empathy. To empathize is to respond to another's perceived emotional ...
Sympathy is a feeling of care and understanding for someone in need. Some include in sympathy an empathic concern for another person, and the wish to see them better off or happier. [21] Empathy is also related to pity and emotional contagion. [22] [21] One feels pity towards others who might be in trouble or in need of help.
When people feel sympathy for inanimate objects, they are anthropomorphizing, attributing human behaviors or feelings to animals or objects who cannot feel the same emotions as we do, Shepard said.
Smith proposes that mutual sympathy heightens the original emotion and "disburdens" the person of sorrow. This is a 'relief' model of mutual sympathy, where mutual sympathy heightens the sorrow but also produces pleasure from relief "because the sweetness of his sympathy more than compensates the bitterness of that sorrow" (p. 14).
Emotion classification, the means by which one may distinguish or contrast one emotion from another, is a contested issue in emotion research and in affective science. Researchers have approached the classification of emotions from one of two fundamental viewpoints: [citation needed] that emotions are discrete and fundamentally different constructs
Moral emotions are linked to a person's conscience - these are the emotions that make up a conscience and promote learning the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, virtuous and evil. When it comes to moral emotions, much changed in recent years. A large part of moral emotions is based on society's interpretation of things.