what is the difference between pity, simpathy and empathy?

Answer 1

Pity and sympathy are closely related, but pity implies a feeling of looking down on the person, while sympathy just means you recognize they are having trouble or hardship and you are sorry. Empathy means you feel the trouble or hardship WITH the person.

p.s. hplover I think is confusing the word EMpathy with Apathy - Apathy means not caring, having no feelings for the person.

Answer 2

Pity and sympathy are synonyms, meaning to feel a sorrow for someone else, although pity usually implies more of a patronizing tone. Empathy means you can identify with someone's feelings.

Regarding the response above -- that person is thinking of apathy; that is when you don't care.

Answer 3

Pity seems to talk down to a person and makes them feel worse. Sympathy and empathy are different in that they respect the person and really try to feel what that person is going through without giving answers.

Answer 4

Pity and sympathy are relative to circumstance brought up within.

A christian or muslim or jew or etc may pity someone who is not one of them because they believe the other will not receive whatever they imagine an afterlife is.

Sympathy is given to those who have had happen to them what you would not wish upon yourself but often comes with little else.

Empathy is feeling what another feels and acting in their best interest without personal gain, although in practice it gives you something whereas pity and sympathy only give you credit for the ability to know the difference and categorize your responce in relationship to exclusive rules of engagement.

Answer 5

The difference is that you have got the spelling of Pity & Empathy correct.

Answer 6

pity is something you have on people in a bad situation but likely are not that concerned.

simpathy is real feelings for someone

empathy is the worst you feel others pain.

Answer 7

Pity- feeling sorry for someone.
Sympathy- Understanding what someone is going thru.
Empathy- ignorant. Not caring.

Answer 8

Pity is an emotion, usually resulting from an encounter with an unfortunate, injured, or pathetic person or creature. A person experiencing pity will often take mercy on the person/creature, giving them aid or money. Many people pity the homeless, orphans, the terminally ill, and victims of rape and torture.

Because pity will result in people aiding the pitiful, most people consider it a positive thing. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, however, believed that pity causes an otherwise normal person to feel the suffering of others; "Pity makes suffering contagious," he says in The Antichrist. He felt that it is important not to make oneself feel superior to the person you are taking pity on. This imbalance could result in retaliation against the help. People value their sense of pride, and pity can negatively affect the situation.
Sympathy is an emotional affinity in which whatever affects one correspondingly affects the other, and its synonym is pity. Sympathy comes from the Latin sympatha, from Greek: συμπάθεια transliterated as sympatheia, from συν + πάσχω = συμπάσχω literally: to suffer together also: affected by like feelings or emotion. Thus the essence of sympathy is that a person's feelings reflect or are like those of another or that a person suffers as a response to, or because of, another person's suffering.

Sympathy exists when the feelings or emotions of one person give rise to similar feelings in another person, creating a state of shared feeling. In common usage, sympathy is usually the sharing of unhappiness or suffering, but it can also refer to sharing other (positive) emotions as well. In a broader sense, it can refer to the sharing of political or ideological sentiments, such as in the phrase "a communist sympathiser".

The psychological state of sympathy is closely linked with that of empathy, but is not identical to it. Empathy refers to the ability to perceive and directly experientially feel another person's emotions as they feel them, but makes no statement as to how they are viewed. Sympathy, by contrast, implies a degree of equal feeling, that is, the sympathiser views the matter similarly to how the person themselves does. It thus implies concern, or care or a wish to alleviate negative feelings others are experiencing.

Empathy (from the Greek εμπάθεια, "to suffer with") is commonly defined as one's ability to recognize, perceive and directly experientially feel the emotion of another. As the states of mind, beliefs, and desires of others are intertwined with their emotions, one with empathy for another may often be able to more effectively divine another's modes of thought and mood. Empathy is often characterized as the ability to "put oneself into another's shoes", or experiencing the outlook or emotions of another being within oneself, a sort of emotional resonance.