If you often get confused between empathy and sympathy, you are at the correct place where you can enhance your knowledge and get detailed knowledge and difference between them.

Empathy and sympathy both the terms are related to understanding feelings and experiences of another person. Empathy is a term used for the ability to understand someone’s feelings as if we were having them ourselves whereas sympathy is the term used to the ability to take part in someone else’s feelings, mostly by feeling sorrowful about their misfortune.

Before moving to the difference let’s explore the definitions of these first.

Empathy

Empathy means that you feel what a person is feeling. Empathy is stronger than sympathy. It is the condition when you imagine yourself in the place of another person. Empathy can be for both positive and negative experience. Empathy refers to the ability to understand the sufferings of another person.

Empathy is feeling the pain and sufferings of another person is undergoing. Being an empathetic person and feeling empathy is a much broader, more intense emotional reaction to a situation someone else or a group of people is going through.

Sympathy

In sympathy, you are not experiencing another’s feeling but feeling sorrowful about their misfortune. Sympathy is feeling compassion, sorrow, or pity for the hardships that another person encounters. Sympathy is used for understanding and caring for the suffering and sorrows of others. It is when someone shares their feelings and experiences with others.

Sympathy is primarily about observation and an acceptance that someone else is going through challenging experiences. It can amount to “feeling sorry” for someone, which is an acknowledgment of a situation.

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Now let’s move to the difference between empathy and sympathy.

Definition

Empathy is putting you in the situation of others and understanding the feelings of others while sympathy is acknowledging another person’s emotional hardships and providing comfort and assurance.

Relationship

Empathy is to understand or feel other’s situation due to personal experience while sympathy is to understand and feel the emotions of others by their experience.

Scope

Empathy is usually the personal feeling and can be one too many whereas Sympathy can be from one to another person or one to the whole community. It can be from the group for a single person vice versa.

Concerned with

Empathy is both for the positive and negative experience and sympathy is for the negative experience.