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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:
Empathic concern is often confused with empathy. To empathize is to respond to another's perceived emotional state by experiencing feeling of a similar sort. Empathic concern or sympathy includes not only empathizing, but also having a positive regard or a non-fleeting concern for the other person. [2]
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.
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. [1]
Social emotions are emotions that depend upon the thoughts, feelings or actions of other people, "as experienced, recalled, anticipated, or imagined at first hand". [1] [2] Examples are embarrassment, guilt, shame, jealousy, envy, coolness, elevation, empathy, and pride. [3]
This is different from empathy, which is having compassion for another person without necessarily absorbing those same feelings. Empathy, Reiser tells me, is built from both cognitive empathy, the ...
For example, smiling makes one feel happier, and frowning makes one feel worse. [3] Mimicry seems to be one foundation of emotional movement between people. Emotional contagion and empathy share similar characteristics, with the exception of the ability to differentiate between personal and pre-personal experiences, a process known as ...