Benevolence, Compassion, Empathy & Sympathy

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I'm trying to figure out my feelings toward other people, and this is what I've come up with...

Benevolence: I wish you well, and want you to be happy. This is my basic attitude toward other people, and requires no ability to perceive or understand their feelings. [Lack of benevolence: I don't care about your happiness or well-being.]

Compassion: I perceive that you are suffering, and I care. I might not understand your emotions, but I see that you are hurting, and want you to feel better. [Lack of compassion: I perceive that you are suffering, and I don't care.]

Empathy: I feel what you feel. Your pain causes a physical and/or emotional reaction in me. (This is rare for me, and I actually find it pretty useless, because it doesn't help the other person, and only serves to upset me.) [Lack of Empathy: your pain does not affect me physically or emotionally.]

Sympathy: I understand how you feel. This is easy if it's something I've felt before, and difficult if I haven't. [Lack of Sympathy: I don't understand how you feel.]

I've seen various definitions for Empathy and Sympathy used on the forum here, and I'm honestly not sure what the correct definition is, but this is how I personally see it.

There are cases where I've had Empathy, and felt someone's anger – but I had no Compassion, because I perceived their suffering, but didn't care. I had no Sympathy because I didn't bother trying to understand why they were angry. But I still felt Benevolence, in that I generally wished that they could be happy.

Anyway, these definitions might not be right, but they help me to analyze and understand some of my more confusing feelings. I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on this!

You're pretty eloquent with your phrasing. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Those definitions are easy for me to understand and i agree with you on them.

Yeah I liked your classification!
I would say in my case I feel all rather strongly, except for sympathy, which is the hardest for me. Usually I assume the person is feeling what I would feel in the situation, not how they are really feeling, so I don't really see or understand what they are feeling.

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Thanks guys – I'm glad at least parts of it make sense!

Willard, your quote is from the opening blurb of Wikipedia. If you scroll down and read the rest of the entry in depth, you will see that according to your own source, 'Empathy' does in fact have multiple definitions, and that feeling another person's emotions is a central part of it.

I'm not saying my definitions are necessarily correct either – but I wrote this because I genuinely want to understand what is meant by these terms. I have alexithymia, and struggle to understand and identify emotions to begin with – and the conflicting definitions that have been offered on this forum have confused me even further.

Okay, so I've been reading the various Wikipedia entries for Empathy, Sympathy, and Compassion... Here's my updated attempt to make sense of all this:

Affective Empathy: I feel your emotions.

Empathic Concern: I feel your emotions, and I am concerned for you.

Compassion: I feel your emotions, and I am concerned for you.

Personal Distress: I feel your emotions, and the feeling distresses me.

Cognitive Empathy: I understand your emotions.

Theory of Mind: I understand your emotions.

Sympathy: I understand your emotions, and I am concerned for you.

According to these definitions, I'm deficient in all of these things! I guess my most common feeling really is just Benevolence: not fully understanding other people's emotions, and generally not feeling anything toward them either, but just philosophically wishing them happiness and well-being.

The other day my mom told me that I lack compassion. Her definition was more or less the same as the OP's, too. I admit it, I'm a selfish person. I don't understand other people's suffering and I don't care about them. The only reason I'm nice to people is because I hate confrontation and hate it when people are upset with me. Even my acts of kindness are nothing more than a way to make me feel good about myself.

I found this:

Empathy: The ability to co-experience and relate to the thoughts, emotions, or experience of another without them being communicated directly by the individual.

Sympathy: The ability to understand and to support the emotional situation or experience of another being with compassion and sensitivity.


I empathise, sometimes too much. An open wound causes a physical uneaseness to me that is hard to explain. Kind of like shivers but different. Always starting at the edge of my armpits at the front and moving like a pulsating ripple towards my chest. A most unpleasant feeling, I have never sat it out, I usually walk away. I have never been in a position that I couldn't walk away. I can pick up emotional moods and am reasonably good at picking social contacts in so far that I rarely get taken for a ride these days. Empathy is an unspoken thing over which no communication is neccesary. I don't think it is something I have learnt on a conscious level. I have had a very eventful life and had I not developed empathy I would not sit here typing this is the way I see things.

Sympathy on the other hand is a social construct to me. It's almost a form of pity.
7 youngsters were killed in a car accident over the weekend. The newspaper was full of it. It is all over the radio and even mr. guzzle knew about it cause everyone was talking about it at work (he never keeps up with news). I stopped reading after the line that read they were doing excessive speed. But 1000's have joined a face book group to express sympathy. All I can wonder is why? I don't know these people. One of the parents was quoted as saying these kind of things are a kind of 'far from my bed show' untill the day the copper knocks on your door to tell you it had happened to someone you actually care about. And till that day you couldn't have cared less.
I always found Christopher Reeve a good example. What did he ever do for spinal injury charities before the day he became a quadriplegic himself? He had no empathy for those before so could not begin to sympathize.

Empathy is not a need to me. It just is.
Sympathy on the other hand can be conjured up. I have been known to pick up when people throw sympathy my way because they feel it is what I would want or because it is what would be expected in the given situation.

Benevolence is, to me, a Confusian concept. It's a form of altruism I suppose. It's about inner goodness. It's about cultivating yourself and "not to do to others as you would not wish done to yourself" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren_(Confucianism)

This thread is not too old and what brought me here was the the fact that I really struggle with not having sympathy in so far it almost feels like it is a social obligation. But then one I seem incapable of obliging to/with

Usually I don't feel anything past sympathy, or maybe less than that, but other times I become strangely compassionate. Only sometimes I wonder if I'm tricking my brain into 'feeling' compassion because I know I'm supposed to feel something. I can't remember a time when I felt empathy.

I agree with the OP's definitions too. They are simple and straightforward to use.

Unfortunately I find they are usually not understood that way by the NT people who put some moral connotation on those terms. I often feel my autistic condition prevents me from supporting people I care for. Sometimes it makes me sad (or even mad), sometimes it mmotivates me to try harder to understand them, but in any way that is not something I think I should think of as "evil".

An extra concern for me is that my native language messes things up. In French you basically don't have a word for "sympathy". (There is an etymological analogue but it is a false friend, the adjective sympathique just means "kind" in a very general fashion.) As a result, many French people don't differentiate between empathy and sympathy, both are covered by empathie and lack of it is seen as being some kind of robot who doesn't feel, understand or care about anyone's emotions.