EMPATHY AND SYMPATHY: WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP?
In moral philosophy, Adam Smith described sympathy as the experience of “fellow-feeling” we have when we observe someone else’s powerful emotional state (Smith, 1759). Sympathy is therefore a clear instance of the affective component of empathy. Sympathy is said to occur when the observer’s emotional response to the distress of another leads the observerto feel a desire to take action to alleviate the other person’s suffering (Davis, 1994). The observer may not actually act on this desire, but at the very least the observer has the emotion of wanting to take appropriate action to reduce the other’s distress. Thus, in Figure 1, sympathy is shown as a special subset of empathy. (We assume sympathy can entail both the cognitive and affective elements of empathy.)
http://imageshack.us/f/140/44802497.png/To give an example, if you walk past a homeless person in winter and you are “moved” or “touched” (both interesting metaphors) to want to help them, this would count as sympathy. You may do nothing more. For example, you may feel that your action would be futile given the many other homeless people in the same neighborhood and the near impossibility of helping them
all. So you might walk past and do nothing. Your reaction would still count as sympathy because you felt the desire to alleviate another’s suffering. This same term would also apply even if you did indeed take action, and gave the homeless person your gloves. If, however, you experienced an appropriate emotion (e.g., pity) to the homeless person’s emotion (e.g., hopelessness), but you did not experience any desire to take action to alleviate his or her suffering, then this would count as empathy, but not sympathy. As a final note of clarification, if you felt an inappropriate emotion to the homeless person’s emotional state (e.g., feeling glad that you had a warm home with a well-stocked refrigerator), this would count as neither empathy nor sympathy.
http://isik.zrc-sazu.si/doc2009/kpms/Ba ... t_2004.pdfIf the above definitions are true (I am not 100% sure) I'd say that I have significantly higher levels of sympathy than the average and lower (but not nonexistent) levels of empathy..
29 Sep 2012, 10:15 pm
