empathy

em·pa·thy

noun \ˈem-pə-thē\

Definition of EMPATHY

1

: the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it

2

: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also : the capacity for this

Examples of EMPATHY

1. He felt great empathy with the poor.
2. His months spent researching prison life gave him greater empathy towards convicts.
3. Poetic empathy understandably seeks a strategy of identification with victims … —Helen Vendler, New Republic, 5 May 2003
4. This is tough love with a vengeance, but what a gruesome view of God's saints bereft of all empathy. —Sidney Callahan, Commonweal, 19 Apr. 2002
5. Enter a new inmate … a giant black man with a gift of preternatural empathy; he can literally suck the pain out of people. —Richard Corliss, Time, 13 Dec. 1999
6. But in all those years of young womanhood, my Do-Unto-Others empathy never extended beyond sharing a trolley seat. —Lois Mark Stalvey, The Education of a WASP, 1989

Origin of EMPATHY

Greek empatheia, literally, passion, from empathēs emotional, from em- + pathos feelings, emotion — more at pathos

First Known Use: 1850

Other Psychology Terms

fetish, hypochondria, intelligence, mania, narcissism, neurosis, pathological, psychosis, schadenfreude, subliminal