Empathy is a word we often encounter today. Everyone talks about empathy. So, what is empathy? How is empathy different from other emotions? This concept, called einfühlung in German, is defined as the situation in which a person reflects himself on the object and establishes an identification with it while examining and observing an object. Empathy, which is expressed as "empathy" or "sympathy" in Turkish and defined by the Turkish Language Association as the ability to understand the feelings, wishes and thoughts of another consciousness without trying, is important in understanding social behavior and explaining human behavior. Many experts agree that it has a role.
Putting oneself in the shoes of another consciousness or, more simply, in the shoes of another person is not enough to understand his/her ideas and feelings. The person should imagine himself/herself as the person in front of him/her and feel this wholeheartedly. In addition, the first condition for feeling empathy towards a person is to have sufficient information about who that person is, what he does and what he wants to do. As John Steinbeck said, “When someone tells you that a million Chinese people are starving, it doesn't mean much until you know one of those Chinese people.”
Pity, Sympathy, Compassion
Empathy is often confused with pity, sympathy and compassion. All these expressions symbolize our feelings towards the needs of others. The feeling of pity is the feeling of uneasiness we feel for people who have been exposed to a negative situation. The feeling of pity is sometimes related to underestimating the other person. Unlike empathy, sympathy and compassion, the feeling of pity is focused on the event rather than the person experiencing the event. Sympathy is generally feelings of care and responsibility felt for someone close to us. These feelings accompany the desire to see the other person happier. Compared to the feeling of pity, we have more in common with people we sympathize with and our motivation to help is higher. The difference from empathy is that in sympathy, we share less common perspective or emotions with the other person. Usually sympa It is thought that empathy and empathy create each other. But this is not always the case. For example, we feel sympathy for a cat in pain, but we cannot empathize. Likewise, psychopaths, who have no sympathy for their victims, display a superior ability to empathize while trapping their victims. Compassion, on the other hand, literally means experiencing the pain directly with the person in front of us. The person feels the other person's pain so deeply that, unlike empathy, he feels the absolute need to intervene in the situation. Empathy means "I share with you what you feel", and compassion means "beyond sharing what you feel with you, I experience these feelings with the same intensity". The first step of compassion is empathy, it is built on it and is the most important factor required for altruism.
Emotions in Sentences
Pity, sympathy, empathy Let's express these feelings with sentences to understand compassion in the best way.
Pity: “I see and understand that you are suffering.”
Sympathy: “I care about your suffering and wish you to be better.”
Empathy: “I understand your pain I can feel it”
Compassion: “I want to relieve your pain”
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