What does empathy mean for you?

Answer 1

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 define 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.

Answer 2

Compassion is often misinterpreted for empathy, although they are similar.

Compassion is a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.

Empathy is the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

So, basically, compassion is when you feel bad that others are going through rough times, but empathy is when you can actually feel what someone else is feeling.

Answer 3

Unlike sympathy, which is to feel sorry for someone, empathy means you understand, or want to understand. Some part of you knows how the other person feels. I think we all have that. It's that old saying "put yourself in someone elses shoes"

Answer 4

empathy is the quality that good people should be able to have, or at the least, be able to fake. empathy is being able to just really being able to just see or even try to experience what another person might being going through. not only should u do that, but i think that empathy should be followed with a surge of emotion, creating a chain of events

Answer 5

Empathy is being able to feel what I am feeling and being able to truly place yourself in my mind and feelings.
It's more than just sympathy- b/c sympathy is just feeling badly for another.. and no one really wants that... but empathy demonstrates a true understanding of my situation.

Answer 6

easy... putting yourself in other shoes and seeing their point of veiw. i personly dont feel much empathy due to my bringing up, but i belive that it is a major pull on society, much like religion. to most empathy is a moral conflict. and it takes ALOT of personal thinking and anolizing to find if you have true empathy.

i love this question, it is the first one that actually struck a cord in me, thank you!

Answer 7

empathy means to be where someone else was, that you know what they are going thru cause you have been thru that.

sympathy is just to feel bad for them.

Answer 8

When you can place yourself in the place of the other person and see things from their perspective.

Answer 9

Since empathy involves understanding the emotions of other people, the way it is characterised is derivative of the way emotions themselves are characterised. If for example, emotions are taken to be centrally characterised by bodily feelings, then grasping the bodily feelings of another will be central to empathy. On the other hand, if emotions are more centrally characterised by combinations of beliefs and desires, then grasping these beliefs and desires will be more essential to empathy.

Furthermore, a distinction should be made between deliberately imagining being another person, or being in their situation, and simply recognising their emotion. The ability to imagine oneself as another person is a sophisticated imaginative process that only fully develops with time, or with considerable training, investigation, or imagination. However the basic capacity to recognise emotions is probably innate and may be achieved unconsciously. Yet it can be trained, and achieved with various degrees of intensity or accuracy.

The human capacity to recognize the bodily feelings of another is related to one's imitative capacities, and seems to be grounded in the innate capacity to associate the bodily movements and facial expressions one sees in another with the proprioceptive feelings of producing those corresponding movements or expressions oneself. Humans also seem to make the same immediate connection between the tone of voice and other vocal expressions and inner feeling. See Organic Basis below.

There is some debate concerning how exactly the conscious experience (or phenomenology) of empathy should be characterised. The basic idea is that by looking at the facial expressions or bodily movements of another, or by hearing their tone of voice, one may get an immediate sense of how they feel (as opposed to more intellectually noting the behavioral symptoms of their emotion). Though empathic recognition is likely to involve some form of arousal in the empathiser, they may not experience this feeling as belonging to their own body, but instead likely to perceptually locate the feeling 'in' the body of the other person. Alternatively the empathiser may instead get a sense of an emotional 'atmosphere' or that the emotion belongs equally to all the parties involved.

More fully developed empathy requires more than simply recognizing another's emotional state. Since emotions are typically directed towards objects or states of affairs, the empathiser may first require some idea of what that object might be (where object can include imaginary objects, concepts, other people, or even the empathiser). Alternatively the recognition of the feeling may precede the recognition of the object of that emotion, or even aid the empathiser in discovering the object of the other's emotion. The empathiser may also need to determine how the emotional state affects the way in which the other perceives the object. For example, the empathizer needs to determine which aspects of the object to focus on. Hence it is often not enough that the empathiser recognize the object toward which the other is directed, plus the bodily feeling, and then simply add these components together. Rather the empathiser needs to find the way into the loop where perception of the object affects feeling and feeling affects the perception of the object. The following sequence of examples identifies some of the major factors in empathising with another:

I sense that:

Frank is feeling annoyed, (via facial, vocal or postural expression).
Frank is feeling annoyed due to not getting what he wants, (general object of emotion).
Frank is feeling annoyed because he missed his train, (particular object of emotion)
Frank is feeling annoyed because he missed his train, but only by a few seconds, (focus of particular object).
Frank is feeling annoyed because he only just missed his train and he had an important meeting to get to, (background non-psychological context).
Frank is feeling annoyed because he only just missed his train, and he had an important meeting and because he is generally an irritable sort of person (character traits).
It should also be noted that the extent to which a person's emotions are publically observable, or mutually recognised as such has significant social conseqences. Empathic recognition may or may not be welcomed or socially desirable. This is particularly the case where we recognise the emotions that someone has towards ourselves during real time interactions. The appropriate role of empathy in our dealings with others is highly dependent on the circumstances. For instance, it is claimed that clinicians or caregivers must take care not to be too sensitive to the emotions of others, to over-invest their own emotions, at the risk of draining away their own resourcefulness.

There are also concerns that the empathiser's own emotional background may affect or distort what emotions they perceive in others. Empathy is not a process that is likely to deliver certain judgements about the emotional states of others. It is a skill that is gradually developed throughout life, and which improves the more contact we have with the person with whom we empathise. Accordingly, any knowledge we gain of the emotions of the other must be revisable in light of further information. Thus awareness of these limitations is prudent in a clinical or caregiving situation.

Answer 10

Placing yourself in somebodys shoes. I think it's a good idea not to criticize anybody until you've walked a mile in their shoes. Because then you'll be a mile away and you have their shoes.