It is easy to confuse empathy with sympathy, but the concepts are different in two important ways. First, sympathy means you feel compassion for another person's predicament, whereas empathy means you have a personal sense of what that predicament is like. Consider the difference between sympathizing with an unwed mother or a homeless person and empathizing with them—imagining what it would be

Question

like to be in their position. When you sympathize, it is the other's confusion, joy, or pain. When you empathize, the experience becomes your own, at least for the moment. Empathy is different from sympathy in a second way. We sympathize only when we accept the reasons for another's pain as valid, whereas it's possible to empathize without feeling sympathy. You can empathize with a difficult relative, a rude stranger, and even a criminal without feeling much sympathy for them. Empathizing allows you to understand another person's motives without requiring you to agree with them. After empathizing you will almost certainly understand them better, but sympathy won't always follow. Neither sympathy nor empathy is identical to the "I know how you feel" type of response that some people offer when faced with another's expression of emotion. Hearing someone else's account—of falling in love or losing a job, for example—might remind you of a similar experience, but it is highly unlikely that your experience matched his or hers. Furthermore, an "I know how you feel" response can be interpreted as a conversational "take-away" in which you disregard the other person's story and begin telling yours. There is no consistent evidence that suggests that the ability to empathize is better for one sex or the other. Some people, however, seem to have a hereditary capacity for greater empathizing than do others. Studies of identical and fraternal twins indicate that identical female twins are more similar to one another in their ability to empathize than are fraternal twins. Interestingly, there seems to be no difference between male twins. Although empathy may have a biological basis, the role of environment can still play an important role. For example, parents who are sensitive to their children's feelings tend to have children who also are sensitive to the feelings of others. The author's claim that, "Some people...seem to have a hereditary capacity for greater empathizing than do others." is

a. adequately supported by evidence.
b. inadequately supported by use of opinion.

Answer 1

A