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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:
It includes feelings of sympathy, compassion, softheartedness, tenderness, sorrow, sadness, upset, distress, concern, and grief. Fourth, empathic concern is other-oriented in the sense that it involves feeling for the other—feeling sympathy for, compassion for, sorry for, distressed for, concerned for, and so on. [3]
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.
Sympathy is the perception of, understanding of, and reaction to the distress or need of another life form. [1]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.
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. [2] An article in Clinical Psychology Review suggests that "compassion consists of three facets: noticing, feeling, and responding". [3]
Darwin suggests sympathy is at the core of sociability and is an instinctive emotion found in most social animals.The ability to recognize and act upon others' distress or danger, is a suggestive evidence of instinctive sympathy; common mutual services found among many social animals, such as hunting and travelling in groups, warning others of danger and mutually defending one another, are ...
Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion is a 2016 book written by psychologist Paul Bloom. The book draws on the distinctions between empathy, compassion, and moral decision making. Bloom argues that empathy is not the solution to problems that divide people and is a poor guide for decision making.
This displays how there is not only an observable difference between sympathy and personal distress. It can also be seen that there is a difference between how children and adults experience either personal distress or sympathy this is largely related to the level of development that the individual has achieved. [7]