HOW ARE EMPATHY AND SYMPATHY THE SAME?
The terms empathy and sympathy are often confused, and with good reason.
Both of the words deal with the relationship a person has to the feelings and experiences of another person.
Both sympathy and empathy have roots in the Greek term páthos meaning “suffering, feeling.”
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WHAT IS SYMPATHY?
Sympathy is the older of the two terms. It entered English in the mid-1500s with a very broad meaning of “agreement or harmony in qualities between things or people.” Since then, the term has come to be used in a more specific way.
Nowadays, sympathy is largely used to convey commiseration, pity, or feelings of sorrow for someone else who is experiencing misfortune. You feel bad for them … but you don’t know what it is like to be in their shoes.
“Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one’s soul.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
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WHAT IS EMPATHY?
Empathy entered English a few centuries after sympathy—in the late 1800s—with a somewhat technical and now obsolete meaning from the field of psychology. Psychologists began using empathy as a translation for the German term Einfühlung. Unlike sympathy, empathy has come to be used in a broader way than it was when it was first introduced; the term is now most often used to refer to the capacity or ability to imagine oneself in the situation of another, experiencing the emotions, ideas, or opinions of that person.
“As you get older you have more respect and empathy for your parents. Now I have a great relationship with both of them.” – Hugh Jackman
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TO SUM IT ALL UP...
Sympathy is feeling compassion, sorrow, or pity for the hardships that another person encounters.
Empathy is putting yourself in the shoes of another, which is why actors often talk about it.
From Dictionary.com
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