In this article I explore the ways in which sympathy and empathy have been used in psychology and suggest that these terms (a) have different historical roots, (b) have been utilized in different research paradigms, and (c) have been involved in different kinds of theorizing. Briefly, sympathy refers to the heightened awareness of another's plight as something to be alleviated. Empathy refers to the attempt of one self-aware self to understand the subjective experiences of another self. Sympathy is a way of relating. Empathy is a way of knowing. I suggest that these are different psychological processes and that the differences between them should not be obfuscated.

Many years ago Lavoisier (1789/1790) wrote that “It is impossible to dissociate language from science or science from language … to call forth a concept a word is needed” (p. xiv–xv). The purpose of this article is to clarify two words, sympathy and empathy, and to distinguish the concepts they call forth. Of course, the important questions are why individuals are moved to sympathy or empathy, under what conditions, and for whom. But problems of terminology are important, too, “not because there are usually right or wrong answers to them,” as Simon (1982) wrote, “but because unless we settle them we will not understand each other” (p. 333). Others have made the same point recently about the concept of emotion (Berscheid, 1984) and theory (Lazarus, 1984).

The confusion between sympathy and empathy has already been noted by psychologists and others knowledgeable in this area. Eisenberg and Lennon (1983) observed that “the cognitive ability to discern others' internal states was sometimes called ‘sympathy’ as well as empathy, although the term sympathy was also used to denote an affective response to another's emotional state” (p. 101). Langer (1972) wrote that “Empathy is sometimes equated with sympathy, but is really something else” (p. 129). And Olinick (1984) commented that “a problem occurs with ‘empathy’ and ‘sympathy’—a blurring of distinctions between the two exists” (p. 317). The purpose of this article, therefore, is to try to clarify and rehabilitate these two concepts. I...