Sympathy and empathy are two closely related but distinct emotions. Sympathy involves feeling sorry or pity for someone, whereas empathy involves understanding and sharing someone’s feelings. Sympathy is more of an external expression of emotion, while empathy is an internal emotional response.
Simply put, sympathy is feeling for someone, while empathy is feeling with someone. Understanding the difference between these two emotions can help us communicate and connect with others on a deeper level.
Definitions
The words sympathy, empathy, and compassion are closely related terms that are often used interchangeably.
However, they are different. The definitions of these terms often demonstrate different aspects of intersubjective experience.
- Sympathy is an emotion experienced in reaction to something that happens to others. When someone understands what another person is going through and feels sorrow or pity toward them, this is sympathy.
- Empathy is the ability to intimately feel and see another’s suffering, not just through understanding what they are going through but by being able to put themselves in another’s shoes. When expressing empathy, a person may use their personal experience to relate to another’s suffering.
- Compassion means ‘to suffer together,’ which is an expression of caring and warmth. Someone who expresses compassion recognizes the pain in another person and is motivated to help them.
What’s the difference between Empathy and Sympathy?
While sympathy and empathy are often used interchangeably, there are crucial differences that lead to different outcomes.
Emotion is the main difference
While sympathy means that someone understands someone else’s suffering, it is more cognitive and keeps a certain distance between the sufferer and the listener.
Being able to empathize means being able to experience another’s feelings. It requires an emotional component of really feeling what the other person is feeling.
Difference in levels of understanding
Another difference between empathy and sympathy lies in the desire to understand the experience of a person who is suffering, not necessarily in the drive to stop their suffering.
Empathy is the ability to understand the emotions of another person. In contrast, sympathy is often utilized when a person does not necessarily relate to or fully understand the circumstances that someone is suffering.
Sympathy does not translate as understanding since the listener may shift focus away from the person in distress to focus on themselves instead.
The relationship matters
With empathy and sympathy, there is often a difference in the relationship between the listener and the sufferer.
In certain settings, such as when a co-worker or boss is suffering from loss, sympathy may be more appropriate to maintain particular social dynamics. This was especially true without an intimate connection.
However, if a lifelong friend experiences a loss, sending a card or flowers may be inadequate. Empathy is usually expected more when the relationship between the sufferer and listener is close and strong.
Sympathy drives disconnection
Empathy is thought to drive connection, while sympathy is thought to drive disconnection, according to social psychologist Brené Brown.
Thus, while empathy brings people together and builds on strong connections, sympathy can create a divide between people.
Sympathetic statements such as ‘I’m sorry you feel like that’ or ‘It could have been worse’ can come across as patronizing.
Likewise, statements such as ‘I feel bad for you’ can come across as pitying, which can make the sufferer feel unsupported.
How do sympathy and empathy relate to compassion?
It is thought that empathy and sympathy can be sensations and open expressions of compassion.
Empathy and sympathy only function as expressions of compassion when they come from a place of sincerity. Compassion itself is fueled by understanding another’s emotions and a genuine desire to connect with their experience.
It has two sources. Compassion can arise from empathy, when someone shares a similar experience directly, or from sympathy, when understanding is gained indirectly.
Learning about a form of abuse, for example, can help someone build sympathy for people who have been abused, even if they have never experienced it themselves.
This indirect route matters. Compassion typically goes a step further than either empathy or sympathy alone.
Someone feeling it recognizes another’s pain and is motivated to help, even without any personal frame of reference for that pain.
That capacity is valuable. Being able to extend care beyond one’s own direct experience means people can become motivated to reduce suffering they have never personally lived through.
A compassionate response in one situation can also become a wider force for change. Compassionate people often become socially active on behalf of a cause well beyond the original person who moved them.
This tension is real. As the licensed marriage and family therapist Esther Perel explains, empathizing with someone who has caused harm is often misread as making excuses for it. She argues the opposite is closer to the truth.
Activating empathy for the person who caused harm is what allows reconnection to become possible again, not a way of minimizing what happened.
Types of Empathy
To better understand how empathy differs from sympathy, it’s helpful to recognize its components:
- Cognitive Empathy: The ability to intellectually understand another’s perspective.
- Emotional Empathy: Feeling the emotions of another person.
- Empathic Action: Responding supportively based on understanding and feeling.
While sympathy often stops at cognitive understanding, true empathy involves all three components.
The Neuroscience of Empathy
Empathy’s neural basis has been studied most directly through pain.
In one influential imaging study, the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), two brain regions, were active when participants felt a painful stimulus themselves.
The same regions activated when participants merely learned that a loved one nearby was receiving a similar shock, and their activity tracked participants’ individual empathy scores (Singer et al., 2004).
By contrast, the brain areas that encode the sensory details of pain, such as where it hurts and how intense it is, activated only when participants felt pain themselves.
This split matters. It suggests empathy recruits the emotional, motivationally relevant share of the pain response, without borrowing the sensory circuitry needed to pinpoint or grade a pain.
This fits the broader idea that empathy runs on shared neural representations between self and other, rather than a dedicated “empathy centre” (Preston & de Waal, 2002).
The mechanism behind this is debated. This step, where perceiving another activates a matching representation, is often linked to the mirror neuron system. These are cells, first identified in monkeys, that fire both when an animal acts and when it watches another animal perform the same action.
The human evidence for an equivalent system is mostly indirect, so how large a role mirror neurons play in human empathy remains an open question.
Research on Sympathy and Empathy
Recent studies provide valuable insights into the development and function of empathy and sympathy across different age groups.
How Empathy and Sympathy Develop
Brazil et al. (2023) found that in adolescents, sympathetic empathy was the strongest predictor of prosocial traits and behaviors. It was also the strongest negative predictor of antisocial traits and behaviors. The pattern held across measures.
Cognitive empathy alone predicted prosocial behavior, while affective empathy alone predicted emotionality but not behavior directly.
Chan et al. (2023) validated the Measure of Empathy in Early Childhood (MEEC) for 4- to 7-year-olds. Personal distress — a self-focused discomfort at witnessing someone else’s suffering that tends to motivate escaping the situation rather than helping — fell with age while sympathy rose.
The two findings fit together. Arman (2023) proposed a theoretical model in which compassion is the foundation from which empathy, sympathy, and altruism all grow. The model associates empathy with cognitive processes, sympathy with emotional engagement, and altruism with action.
The developmental evidence points the same way. Yavuz et al. (2024) found that emotion regulation was more strongly associated with sympathy than with empathy across childhood and adolescence.
This suggests that managing one’s own emotions matters more for feeling concern on someone else’s behalf than for simply sharing what they feel.
Together, these findings highlight the multifaceted, developmental nature of empathy and sympathy, and the potential for targeted interventions to build prosocial behavior.
Empathy in Long-Term Relationships
Most of the research above comes from children and teenagers. A 2025 study looked instead at how accurately adults read each other’s emotions once a relationship is already established (Kotiuga et al., 2025).
The study followed 327 couples through a 35-day daily diary. Each day, both partners reported their own emotions, their sense of their partner’s emotions, and how much they had shared their feelings that day.
Partners were generally accurate at tracking day-to-day changes in each other’s emotions, especially on days when feelings had been voiced out loud. Accuracy was not the whole story, though.
Partners also leaned heavily on their own current mood as a cue to guess what their partner was feeling. How cared-for someone felt tracked the intensity of emotion more closely than it tracked raw accuracy.
Being read correctly is not quite the same as being made to feel understood.
Empathy and Compassion in Healthcare
Physicians have traditionally been trained to keep some emotional distance from patients.
That distance has a cost.
The reasoning was that unregulated emotional resonance is exhausting over a career (Jeffrey, 2016).
A 2025 study interviewed 18 patients about what empathy from a clinician actually felt like to receive (von Knorring et al., 2025). Their central need, the researchers found, was to be known as a whole human being.
One patient described being reduced to a diagnosis.
“I felt like all I was, was an arm… I felt as if I was disgusting” (von Knorring et al., 2025).
Another patient explained what it felt like to be genuinely attended to instead.
“The patient needs to be regarded as a resource… I feel like I am being taken seriously” (von Knorring et al., 2025).
A third patient put it simply.
“They need to show real interest in my story and that I am the most important thing” (von Knorring et al., 2025).
Read alongside the couples’ findings above, the pattern repeats: what people register as being cared for is not raw accuracy at guessing an inner state.
It is sustained, visible engagement with the person in front of them.
Alternative Models of Empathy and Compassion
The cognitive-emotional-action split above is a useful teaching model, but it is not the only account of empathy in the psychological literature. Rival models disagree about the underlying architecture in ways that change how empathy is measured and trained.
One Mechanism or Three Separate Skills?
The Perception-Action Model (PAM) argues that empathy is not a stack of independent skills. It is one evolutionarily continuous process (Preston & de Waal, 2002).
Perceiving another person’s state directly activates the observer’s own matching representation of that state. This in turn triggers a matching bodily response.
The same basic circuitry that produces alarm-calling and mother-infant responsiveness across many species, on this account, also underlies human empathy. What looks like a separate “cognitive empathy” skill is really the degree of self-regulation layered on top of that shared loop, not a distinct faculty.
This reframes cognitive empathy entirely.
This is a genuinely different starting point from the three-part model above. Instead of three skills that can be present or absent independently, PAM treats feeling and acting as coupled by default.
On this account, self-regulation does the real work. Keeping another person’s state from simply taking over one’s own is what “cognitive empathy” gets credit for in the three-part model, rather than a separate skill.
Davis’s Four-Facet Model
Davis’s (1983) multidimensional model, built around a measure called the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, splits empathy into four facets. They are perspective-taking, fantasy, empathic concern, and personal distress.
Personal distress is folded into “emotional empathy” in the three-part model above. Davis treats it separately, because it behaves differently.
Personal distress and empathic concern produce opposite motivational consequences. Distress drives escape from the situation, while concern drives help even when escape is easy.
Collapsing the two into one category, as the three-part model does, can hide exactly the distinction that predicts whether feeling something for another person actually turns into helping them.
This is not just a labelling dispute. Research on the empathy-altruism link has found that personal distress and empathic concern produce opposite behaviour, even when the two are easy to confuse in the moment. Distress drives escape; concern drives help.
Where Does Compassion Come From?
Two accounts disagree about where compassion itself originates. Arman’s (2023) model treats compassion as the root that empathy, sympathy, and altruism all grow from.
A different account argues that compassion is its own discrete affective state, with a recognisable signalling profile of touch, posture, and vocalisation distinct from sadness or love.
On this view, compassion evolved specifically to motivate protection of the vulnerable, rather than being generated by empathy or sympathy after the fact (Goetz et al., 2010).
Neither model has been decisively favoured. Each implies a different order of operations for training compassion: teach recognition-and-motivation directly, or build it through empathy and sympathy first.
Which model an empathy-training programme or clinical assessment assumes changes what it measures and what it tries to build. A three-component framework invites teaching perspective-taking as if it were separable from emotional resonance, which the four-facet and continuous-process accounts both suggest may not be possible in practice.
Building Empathy as a Listener
Below are some other tips for cultivating empathy:
Actively listen
When someone actively listens, they are not just listening to the words that are being said.
They are paying close attention to what the other person is saying, getting a sense of the feelings that the speaker is expressing, and looking out for non-verbal cues.
Listen patiently instead of focusing on what the response should be. When the person is finished speaking, take a moment to process the information before responding.
Understand what the other person needs
Resist the urge to leap to conclusions about what someone needs when they tell you what they are going through.
Use listening skills to figure out what they need. If this is unclear, it is better to ask directly than to offer the wrong kind of support.
Repeating back to someone what was heard is a good way to find out what someone needs.
For instance, saying, ‘What I am hearing is that you don’t feel valued when X happens, is that right?’ can get to the point of what the other person needs.
Prioritize emotional intelligence
Those who have high emotional intelligence tend to be more self-aware, are better able to manage themselves, are aware of social cues, and are more capable of managing relationships.
Practicing ways of being more emotionally intelligent can therefore go hand-in-hand with being an empathic listener.
What not to do
- Don’t interrogate or argue: Direct questions, arguments, and disputed facts put a barrier between listener and sufferer. Focus fully on what is being said and how the speaker feels instead.
- Skip unsolicited opinions: The listener does not need to agree with everything the other person says. What matters is showing the speaker they are cared for and that they matter.
- Don’t fill the silence: Sometimes all someone needs is to feel heard. A pause may just be the speaker gathering their thoughts or processing their emotions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is stronger: sympathy or empathy?
Sympathy is essentially telling someone, ‘I u003cemu003eknowu003c/emu003e how you feel,’ whereas empathy is saying, ‘I u003cemu003efeel u003c/emu003ehow you feel.’u003cbru003eu003cbru003eEmpathy is deeper and more intense than sympathy. It is about acknowledging a person’s feelings and genuinely imaging and trying to feel what it’s like to be in their situation.
Can you be empathetic without being sympathetic?
Empathy is the ability to feel someone else’s emotions, whereas sympathy means feeling and/or showing a reaction such as sorrow or pity. u003cbru003eu003cbru003eIn the same way that sympathy can occur without empathy, it is possible to understand another person’s emotions without being sympathetic. For example, someone who is a u003ca href=u0022https://www.simplypsychology.org/narcissistic-personality-disorder.htmlu0022 data-type=u0022postu0022 data-id=u002211434u0022u003enarcissistu003c/au003e may be able to perceive what others are feeling but lack the sympathy to care about another person.
Is empathy the same as altruism?
These two terms are related emotions; therefore, many tend to consider them as the same thing. However, someone who is altruistic can practice selfless concern for others’ welfare. u003cbru003eu003cbru003eIt is the charitable emotion to help others without expecting anything in return. Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand another’s emotions and to share their feelings. u003cbru003eu003cbru003eEmpathy and altruism are related since both trigger acts of generosity in someone towards another. Empathy can also be the reason why someone is altruistic.
What is a dark empath?
Not all empaths have good intentions. Someone who is a u003ca href=u0022https://www.simplypsychology.org/dark-triad-personality.htmlu0022 data-type=u0022postu0022 data-id=u002211613u0022u003edark empathu003c/au003e is highly attuned to others’ emotions, but they use their empathic abilities as a weapon.u003cbru003eu003cbru003eA dark empath knows how to connect with another person but can use their knowledge to manipulate or take advantage of another person. u003cbru003eu003cbru003eA dark empath can give a false sense of trust to others when first getting to know them since they can portray their empathy in a positive light. This can lead to others thinking highly of them since they clearly show displays of empathy. u003cbru003eu003cbru003eThis makes it more dangerous later down the line: the dark empath uses their empathy to manipulate others for personal gain. That manipulation may go unnoticed until people are hurt.
Can you have compassion without empathy?
Compassion is not the same as empathy, although the concepts are related. Empathy refers more generally to the ability to take the perspective of and feel the emotions of another person. Compassion is when those feelings and thoughts include the desire to help.u003cbru003eu003cbru003eIt is possible to display kindness and compassion for practical reasons without any real empathy for others’ suffering. Someone may have the desire to help people in need without attaching deeper emotions and understanding of the suffering they are going through.
What is more important: empathy or compassion?
Empathy and compassion are needed in everyday life, especially when interacting with others. Without them, it can be difficult to maintain healthy relationships. u003cbru003eu003cbru003eEmpathy and compassion can help people to exhibit kind and loving behavior toward people they care about, which helps reinforce relationships. u003cbru003eu003cbru003eDark empaths and narcissists can misuse empathy to manipulate others. A time when empathy may be dangerous on its own is when it comes to u003ca href=u0022https://www.simplypsychology.org/leadership-styles.htmlu0022 data-type=u0022postu0022 data-id=u002211478u0022u003eleadershipu003c/au003e. u003cbru003eu003cbru003eIn times of crisis, having a leader who is only empathetic may understand others’ suffering, but this does not mean they will do anything about it. Being a compassionate leader, on the other hand, can cultivate positive change and unify people.
Key Takeaways
- Sympathy vs Empathy: Sympathy is feeling concern for someone from a cognitive distance; empathy is feeling with them, sharing their emotion directly.
- Three Components: Empathy breaks down into cognitive, emotional, and action components. Sympathy usually stops at the cognitive level.
- Compassion: Compassion goes further than either, motivating someone to help even when they cannot personally relate to the other person’s pain.
- Context Matters: Closer relationships tend to call for empathy, while more socially distant ones, such as a co-worker or boss, often call for sympathy instead.
- Recent Evidence: 2025 research on couples and on healthcare patients both suggest what matters most is not accuracy in reading someone’s feelings, but sustained, visible care.
- Dark Empaths: High cognitive empathy without compassion can be used to manipulate people rather than help them.
References
Arman, M. (2023). Empathy, sympathy, and altruism—An evident triad based on compassion. A theoretical model for caring. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 37(3), 862-871.
Brazil, K. J., Volk, A. A., & Dane, A. V. (2023). Is empathy linked to prosocial and antisocial traits and behavior? It depends on the form of empathy. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science/Revue canadienne des sciences du comportement, 55(1), 75.
Breyer, T. (2020). Empathy, sympathy and compassion. In The Routledge handbook of phenomenology of emotion (pp. 429-440). Routledge.
Brown, B., Davis, K., Stephenson, A., & Francis-Sears, A. (2013). Brené Brown on empathy.
Chan, A. B., Fleming, G. E., Kaouar, S., & Kimonis, E. R. (2023). The measure of empathy in early childhood: Testing the reliability, validity, and clinical utility of scores in early childhood. Psychological Assessment, 35(9), 791–803.
Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113-126. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.44.1.113
Goetz, J. L., Keltner, D., & Simon-Thomas, E. (2010). Compassion: An evolutionary analysis and empirical review. Psychological Bulletin, 136(3), 351-374. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018807
Heym, N., Kibowski, F., Bloxsom, C. A., Blanchard, A., Harper, A., Wallace, L., Firth, J. & Sumich, A. (2021). The Dark Empath: Characterising dark traits in the presence of empathy. Personality and individual differences, 169, 110172.
Jeffrey, D. (2016). Empathy, sympathy and compassion in healthcare: Is there a problem? Is there a difference? Does it matter?. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 109(12), 446-452.
Preston, S. D., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2002). Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25(1), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X02000018
Salem, R. (2003). Empathic listening. Beyond intractability.
Singer, T., Seymour, B., O’Doherty, J., Kaube, H., Dolan, R. J., & Frith, C. D. (2004). Empathy for pain involves the affective but not sensory components of pain. Science, 303(5661), 1157-1162. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1093535
von Knorring, J., Lehti, A., Lindvall, K., & Semb, O. (2025). I want to be known as a whole human being: A qualitative study about patients’ experiences of empathy in health care. Journal of Patient Experience, 12. https://doi.org/10.1177/23743735251369702
Yavuz, H. M., Colasante, T., Galarneau, E., & Malti, T. (2024). Empathy, sympathy, and emotion regulation: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 150(1), 27–44.
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