Empathy vs. Sympathy

Hi everyone!! Back today again with another blog post! This blog post will be about the differences and similarities between empathy and sympathy. To make this a little easier I am going to separate this into different paragraphs:

EMPATHY:

• is the intellectual identification or vicarious experiences of feeling, thoughts, and attitudes of others.
• The experience of understanding another person's condition from their perspective.
• Key Ideas: understanding, knowledge, imagination, thinking about feeling
• Actions: thinking

SYMPATHY:

• are the feelings of pity or sorrow for someone else's misfortune.
• Emotion and Feeling!
• Actions: affirmation, comfort, condolences, words of comfort
• Downsides: social, interaction, limited or strained, people see you as unapproachable

SIMILARITIES:

• may or may not have something to do with shared experience
• both have something to do with feeling, but empathy is thinking about feelings and sympathy is having feelings

The reason why empathy is important for historians is because they have to understand what the person was going through. They have to understand why the tragedies happened and why those people died. Having their emotions open will also keep their minds open.

Thanks for reading!!

xoxo Ellie