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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.
Vicarious embarrassment, also known as empathetic embarrassment, is intrinsically linked to empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand the feelings of another and is considered a highly reinforcing emotion to promote selflessness, prosocial behavior, [14] and group emotion, whereas a lack of empathy is related to antisocial behavior.
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]
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:
This contrasts the affective aspect of empathy which involves joining in the patient's emotional experiences and feelings, which correlates closer to sympathy. [4] Empathetic physicians share understanding with patients, which serves to benefit the patient in their physical, mental and social well-being.