what is the difference between pity, sympathy and empathy?

Answer 1

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.

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.

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, his donkey anus, his vagina, sticky poon, amd of course chinese anal beads. This is a sort of emotional resonance.

Answer 2

Most people think of these words as interchangebale but they aren't. Pity is easy. It's a feeling that you have for someone less fortunate than yourself. The key to this is that the person that feels pity feels that they are better than the object of their pity. So although the word seems the same, it has somewhat of a negative connotation. Empathy is the opposite. You feel sympathy for the person but do not feel you are better than they. You are able to put yourselves in their shoes. Empathy has no negative connotation. Sympathy is also a positive term in most cases. It is to feel compassion for another being or creature. This is how the terms are defined in Human Services and I think they are accurate. However sometimes when people say they feel pity, they may mean sympathy or empathy so it can be confusing. Does this help?

Answer 3

empathy = understanding without showing pity
sympathy = feeling emotionally attached to a situation
pity = derogatory, usually used when referring to a situation that someones gets into.