from groups and explain the following words with examples you can take help of the teacher is sympathy in answer
Answers
Sympathy is feeling bad for someone else because of something that has happened to them.
We often talk about it and feel sympathetic when someone has died, or something bad has happened, saying ‘Give them my sympathy’, or ‘I really feel for them’.
As a concept, sympathy is closely connected to both empathy and compassion. You may find our pages: What it Empathy? and Compassion useful too.
Sympathy, Empathy and Compassion
What is the distinction between sympathy, empathy and compassion? The words are often used interchangeably, but they do have important differences.
Some Working Definitions
sympathy n. power of entering into another’s feelings or mind: … compassion
empathy n. the power of entering into another’s personality and imaginatively experiencing his experiences.
compassion n. fellow-feeling, or sorrow for the sufferings of another
Chambers English Dictionary, 1989 edition
These definitions, however, do not necessarily help to establish the difference. It may be helpful to look at the origin of the words.
Sympathy comes from the Greek syn, meaning with and pathos, or suffering.
Compassion is from the Latin com, meaning with, and passus, to suffer.
In other words, sympathy and compassion have exactly the same root, but in different languages.
Empathy also comes from the Greek, from en meaning in, and pathos, again for suffering. There is, therefore, a much stronger sense of experience in empathy.
Sympathy or compassion is feeling for the other person, empathy is experiencing what they experience, as if you were that person, albeit through the imagination.
As our page on Compassion argues, however, there has come to be an element of action in the use of the word compassion which is lacking from sympathy or empathy.
A feeling of compassion, then, usually results in some action, perhaps donating money or time. Sympathy tends to begin and end with fellow-feeling, or ‘expressing your sympathy’.
Causes of Sympathy
For people to experience sympathy towards someone else, several elements are necessary:
You must be paying attention to the other person.
Being distracted limits our ability to feel sympathy.
The other person must seem in need in some way.
Our perceptions of the level of need will determine the level of sympathy. For example, someone with a graze on their knee will get less sympathy than someone else with a broken leg.
We are also much more likely to be sympathetic towards someone who appears to have done nothing to ‘earn’ their misfortune.
The child who falls while running towards a parent will get more sympathy than the one who was doing something that they had been specifically told not to do, and has fallen as a result.