What is the difference between empathy and sympathy?

Sympathy is acknowledging and caring about another person's difficulty from your own vantage point, and it is what a sympathy card expresses: sorrow for what someone is going through. Empathy is the capacity to understand and share another person's feelings, to model their experience from the inside. The distinction is often summarized as feeling for versus feeling with. Psychologists further split empathy into cognitive empathy, understanding what someone feels and why, and affective empathy, actually experiencing a version of the feeling, and the two can occur separately.

The words shifted over time, which is why older usage confuses the picture. Sympathy once carried the meaning empathy now holds, and empathy is a twentieth-century coinage from a German term in aesthetics describing projecting oneself into a work of art. In everyday use today, sympathy has drifted toward pity and distance, which is why saying I sympathize can land as detached, while empathy has become the preferred term for genuine understanding.

Two points that keep the distinction useful rather than merely vocabulary. Research on helping and on clinical communication finds that empathic responses, reflecting the person's experience back accurately, are received better than sympathetic ones that observe from outside, which is the basis of the advice to avoid opening with at least. And empathy has limits worth knowing: affective empathy can produce distress and burnout in caregivers, and cognitive empathy can be used manipulatively, which is why compassion, understanding paired with a motivation to help, is sometimes proposed as the more durable target.