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Empathy and sympathy are often mixed up, but they're totally different emotions. A psychotherapist explains the key differences between the two reactions:
Others use different terms for this construct or very similar constructs. Especially popular—perhaps more popular than "empathic concern"—are sympathy, compassion, or pity. [4] Other terms include the tender emotion and sympathetic distress. [5] People are strongly motivated to be connected to others. [6]
Empathy is generally described as the ability to take on another person's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience. [1] [2] [3] 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.
The definition of compassion is often confused with that of empathy. Empathy, as defined by researchers, is the visceral or emotional experience of another person's feelings. It is, in a sense, an automatic mirroring of another's emotion, like tearing up at a friend's sadness.
To feel sympathy for a person or group, you must first pay attention to them. [6] When one is distracted, this severely limits one's ability to produce strong affective responses. [7] When not distracted, people can attend to and respond to a variety of emotional subjects and experiences. The perceived need of an individual/group elicits sympathy.
Empathy is defined by Eisenberg and colleagues as an affective response that stems from the apprehension or comprehension of another's emotional state or condition and is similar to what the other person is feeling or would be expected to feel. [29]
Empathy: adept at modulating the emotional responses of others and helping them to express their emotions; Social skills: excellent communication skills; Personal Competence; Self-Awareness – Know one's internal states, preferences, resources and intuitions. The competencies in this category include:
There is evidence that individual empathetic responses to the pain of others are biased based on racial identity, in-group/out-group status, and position on a social hierarchy. Experiences of pain empathy also vary depending on differences in personality such as the level of threat sensitivity in an individual.