empathy
Empathy is the ability to feel what another person is feeling and to see a situation from that person’s point of view.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)Definitions
- The ability to understand and share the feelings of another person.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - The act of entering imaginatively into another person’s experience, or (in aesthetics) into an object.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)
Examples
- Good doctors combine technical skill with empathy.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - He described the loss with an empathy that made the room go quiet.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)
Usage
Empathy appears in psychology, medicine, education and management writing, and in ordinary conversation it usually means a kindly attentiveness to someone else. Specialists separate cognitive empathy, which is understanding another perspective, from emotional empathy, which is sharing the feeling itself. In everyday use the word is nearly always uncountable, and the common shapes are show empathy, have empathy and a lack of empathy.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)The noun takes the preposition for before the person or group: empathy for the patient, empathy for people in debt. It also combines with with in the phrase in empathy with, though that pattern is bookish. Verbs that commonly precede it are show, feel, express and lack. The plural empathies is rare and appears mainly when separate acts of understanding are being counted.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)Empathy is often confused with sympathy. Sympathy is feeling sorry about someone’s trouble, which places the observer outside the experience, while empathy is entering the experience itself. Confusing them matters in care work, where sympathy can leave a patient feeling pitied and empathy makes them feel understood. A second loose use treats empathy as any technique of repeating back what someone said.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)Word forms
Regular forms according to English morphology (editorial description).
word forms
| przypadek | forma |
|---|---|
| singular | empathy |
Word forms: Editorial team
Collocations
- show empathy
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - a lack of empathy
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - empathy for
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)
Synonyms · Antonyms
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)source
Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)Etymology
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E. B. Titchener, Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes, 1909, open sourceRelated words
- empathetic , adjective
Related entries
Questions and answers
What does empathy mean?
Empathy names the capacity to take in another person’s emotional state as if it were one’s own, and to grasp how the situation looks from where they stand. It also covers the act of entering someone’s experience imaginatively, and in aesthetics the projection of feeling into an object.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)Is empathy countable?
In ordinary use empathy is uncountable: she showed great empathy, a lack of empathy. The plural empathies exists but is rare, and it appears only when separate instances are being counted. Learners are safe with the singular, which covers nearly every context in speech and in most writing.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)What is the difference between empathy and sympathy?
Sympathy is feeling sorry for someone, while empathy is feeling with them. Sympathy keeps a distance: the other person is in trouble and you are not. Empathy closes that distance by reproducing the other person’s state, which is why it is often described as putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)Where does the word empathy come from?
E. B. Titchener introduced it into English in 1909 as a rendering of the German Einfühlung, the aesthetic term for feeling one’s way into an object. He modelled it on Greek empatheia, affection or passion, from en, in, and pathos, feeling. The word therefore began as a translation and only later became a general term.