EMPATHY AND SYMPATHY: WHAT IS
THE RELATIONSHIP?
In moral philosophy, Adam Smith described sympathy
as the experience of “fellow-feeling” we have
when we observe someone else’s powerful emotional
state (Smith, 1759). Sympathy is therefore a clear instance
of the affective component of empathy. Sympathy
is said to occur when the observer’s emotional
response to the distress of another leads the observer
to feel a desire to take action to alleviate the other
person’s suffering (Davis, 1994). The observer may not
actually act on this desire, but at the very least the
observer has the emotion of wanting to take appropriate
action to reduce the other’s distress. Thus, in Figure 1,
sympathy is shown as a special subset of empathy. (We
assume sympathy can entail both the cognitive and
affective elements of empathy.)