Empathy vs. Pathos — What's the Difference?

Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position. Definitions of empathy encompass a broad range of emotional states.

Pathos (, US: ; plural: pathea or pathê; Greek: πάθος, for "suffering" or "experience" or "something that one undergoes," or "something that happens to one". In medicine it refers to a "failing," "illness", or "complaint.

The ability to identify with or understand the perspective, experiences, or motivations of another individual and to comprehend and share another individual's emotional state.

A quality that evokes pity or sadness

The projection of one's own feelings or thoughts onto something else, such as an object in a work of art or a character in a novel or film.

A quality, as of an experience or a work of art, that arouses feelings of pity, sympathy, tenderness, or sorrow.

Identification with or understanding of the thoughts, feelings, or emotional state of another person.

The feeling, as of sympathy or pity, so aroused.

Capacity to understand another person's point of view or the result of such understanding.

The quality or property of anything which touches the feelings or excites emotions and passions, especially that which awakens tender emotions, such as pity, sorrow, and the like; contagious warmth of feeling, action, or expression; pathetic quality.

A paranormal ability to psychically read another person's emotions.

(rhetoric) A writer or speaker's attempt to persuade an audience through appeals involving the use of strong emotions such as pity.

MDMA.

(literature) An author's attempt to evoke a feeling of pity or sympathetic sorrow for a character.

Understanding and entering into another's feelings

In theology and existentialist ethics following Kierkegaard and Heidegger, a deep and abiding commitment of the heart, as in the notion of "finding your passion" as an important aspect of a fully lived, engaged life.

Suffering; the enduring of active stress or affliction.

That quality or property of anything which touches the feelings or excites emotions and passions, esp., that which awakens tender emotions, such as pity, sorrow, and the like; contagious warmth of feeling, action, or expression; pathetic quality; as, the pathos of a picture, of a poem, or of a cry.

The quality or character of those emotions, traits, or experiences which are personal, and therefore restricted and evanescent; transitory and idiosyncratic dispositions or feelings as distinguished from those which are universal and deep-seated in character; - opposed to ethos.

Suffering; the enduring of active stress or affliction.

A quality that arouses emotions (especially pity or sorrow);

A feeling of sympathy and sorrow for the misfortunes of others;

A style that has the power to evoke feelings