3 Empathy
One useful way to start to conceptualise what we mean by empathy is to look at where the word itself emerged from. There are two routes underpinning the origins of the word. One is the ancient Greek word empatheia which means passion or physical affection (Jamieson, 2014). The second route is the German adaptation of the term em (into) and pathos (feeling). This sense of ‘feeling into’ someone else’s emotional state is a useful way of conceptualising empathy and one that sets it apart from sympathy.
To put it simply, sympathy is saying ‘I’m sorry to hear that’ when a friend (for the purposes of this example let’s call her Joanne) tells you that her cat has died. Empathy is much more involved than sympathy and means psychologically experiencing someone else’s cognitive perspective and emotional state, while still maintaining a sense of your own identity as separate (Coplan, 2011). Being empathic towards Joanne would involve thinking it through from her perspective, such as thinking, ‘Oh no, I know Joanne lives on her own, and she works from home, and the cat is really good company for her, the house will seem really quiet without anyone else around’. Empathy is, therefore, argued to be a process that involves imagining what it is like to be the other person, rather than just imagining how the circumstances that have befallen someone else might feel if they happened to you.