Sympathy vs. Empathy

Sympathy is feeling pity or sorrow for someone else's misfortune. Sympathy could be shown with words of affirmation or comfort. There are many perks of expressing sympathy but if not expressed then people may view you as unapproachable as well as limiting your social interactions. While sympathy is more of feeling and having emotion towards someone, empathy is more of thinking about the feelings of someone else. Empathy is the intellectual identification or vicarious experience of feelings and attitudes of others habits. They key ideas of empathy is understanding, imagination, and thinking about feelings. Empathetic people experience understanding another's condition from their perspective. Sympathy and empathy contain many differences but also contain many similarities. For example, they both deal with whether or not you have experienced the same situation and they both deal with feelings. Different situations require either sympathy or empathy.

Empathy is a powerful emotion that can do many amazing things. It is necessary to have empathy in our lives because it allows humans to understand how to connect with others based upon their past experiences. Throughout history, we were faced with multiple challenges of wars, rebellion, and our inability at times to care for one another. As we have grown and overcome obstacles we have learned to feel empathy not just for our country and friends but for other countries as well. When countries need help, other countries come together to help them out because they all know how it is to need something very hard to obtain. Natural disasters can strip citizens of everything they have and are in a great need of help. History has helped shape the world into caring and empathetic people because of all the trial and error of how to overcome obstacles. We could never be where we are now if it was not for history and the help from others.