sympathy(UNDERSTANDING)

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Empathy and sensitivity
attuned
commune
commune with something
communicate
communicate with someone/something
communion
empathically
empathize
identify
identify with someone
in communion with someone/something
relate
self-communing
self-communion
sensitive
sensitively
sensitiveness
speak
speak someone's languageidiom
understanding

Examples from literature

Part of it may not be empathy, but simply be precaution and an insurance for the event of personal misfortune. 
Some of the settlers had empathy with the dolphins to a high degree, but Ross's own powers of contact were relatively feeble. 

empathy | American Dictionary

empathy
noun[ U ]
us/ˈem·pə·θi/
the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation:
He loves children and has a certain empathy with them.

Examples of empathy

empathy
As noted above, negative feelings play important roles in impulse control, empathy, and conscience.
Lower levels of empathy may contribute to conflict in social interactions and thereby heighten levels of negative emotions experienced by some children.
The developmental literature points to at least 6 levels of empathy emerging in succession, each expanding and adding to the repertoire of empathic potential.
The major focus of the 24- and 36-month visits is on parenting and toddler self-regulation (behavior problems, empathy, compliance, and internalization of parental rules).
Examples include empathy, flexibility, sensitivity and courage, precise qualities varying according to the individual.
Developing representations of possibilities for prosocial actions are also important in developing outcomes for empathy and guilt.
Moreover, peer play forces children to reason about others' feelings, possibly serving as a unique mechanism for empathy development.
In the present study we assess the third component, empathy, by children's self-repor ts of affective response to social stimuli.
Perspective-taking can also initiate a preverbal process (one hears about a familiar victim's misfortune and imagines his facial expression, which triggers empathy).
Many respondents showed tremendous empathy for ex-combatants and emphasised that they would not normally commit atrocities.
And while she addresses them with empathy, she cannot give them voice, for they have never learned to speak for themselves.
It may be that the addition of sympathy, in the primitive sense of emotional contagion, to perspective taking is sufficient to constitute empathy.
It confers on the various perspectives on empathy only a specious nominal unity.
Goals for future research include determining the ways in which empathy is emotion-specific and dependent on overt or covert perception.
However, conceptual and empirical advances depend upon identification of different forms of empathy, as well as the reasons and motives for different forms of expression.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.