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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]
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".
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.
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]
Psychologists see pity arising in early childhood out of the infant's ability to identify with others. [3]Psychoanalysis sees a more convoluted route to (at least some forms of) adult pity by way of the sublimation of aggression—pity serving as a kind of magic gesture intended to show how leniently one should oneself be treated by one's own conscience.
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.
Paul Bloom defines empathy the way that Adam Smith describes sympathy in Theory of Moral Sentiments.For Bloom, "[e]mpathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does" [1]: 16 [emphasis in original].