What is Sympathy? Understanding the Structure of Other-Oriented Emotions

Abstract

Sympathy (empathic concern) is mainly understood as a feeling for another and is often contrasted with empathy—a feeling with another. However, it is not clear what feeling for another means and what emotions sympathy involves. Since empirical data suggests that sympathy plays an important role in our social lives and is more closely connected to helping behavior than empathy, we need a more detailed account. In this paper, I argue that sympathy is not a particular emotion but a type of emotional experience: those that have another person as focus. I explain what this means and show that this sheds light on why sympathy, rather than empathy, directly motivates altruistic actions.

Full text

What is Sympathy? Understanding the Structure
of Other-Oriented Emotions
Elodie Malbois
Institute for Ethics, History, and the Humanities, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Abstract
Sympathy (empathic concern) is mainly understood as a feeling for another and is often contrasted with empathy—a feeling with
another. However, it is not clear what feeling for another means and what emotions sympathy involves. Since empirical data suggests
that sympathy plays an important role in our social lives and is more closely connected to helping behavior than empathy, we need a
more detailed account. In this paper, I argue that sympathy is not a particular emotion but a type of emotional experience: those that
have another person as focus. I explain what this means and show that this sheds light on why sympathy, rather than empathy, dir-
ectly motivates altruistic actions.
Keywords
sympathy, empathy, empathic concern, emotions
Empathy and sympathy, which is also called empathic
concern,
1
involve affective states that are more appropriate to
another person’s situation than our own. As I will understand
them here, the difference between them can be broadly under-
stood as one between feeling with and for another (Slote, 2007,
p. 13). Empathizing consists in feeling what another is feeling,
or something close enough, often as a result of taking that
person’s perspective, although not necessarily (de Vignemont
& Singer, 2006; Maibom, 2017). Sympathy is a reaction
from a caring third-person perspective (Darwall, 1998). It
involves feeling happy for another when something good
happens to her and sad for her when something bad happens
to her (Maibom, 2017, p. 2). If a friend is going wingsuit
flying, for instance, empathizing with her might include
putting ourselves in her shoes and feeling her thrill about
doing it, while sympathizing with her might make us feel
worried about her because wingsuit flying looks very danger-
ous to us.
Although this distinction between empathy and sympathy is
often put forward, most authors only provide a broad character-
ization of sympathy. As a result, it is not clear what emotions
can be felt in sympathy (Maibom, 2014). According to
Batson, when felt for someone in a difficult situation, sympathy
can include sadness, worry, sorrow, compassion, and warmth
among others (2011). Furthermore, while authors agree that
sympathy involves concern for another, they do not specify if
concern is part of the emotional experience of sympathy, occur-
ring along with it or causing it. Our current understanding of this
affect seems to rely mostly on the intuitive understanding of the
distinction between feeling with and for someone.
The lack of precise understanding of what characterizes
sympathy has not prevented empirical research on it. A
growing body of research in psychology suggests that sym-
pathy, rather than empathy, directly motivates altruistic
behavior (Batson, 2011). Given the important role that sym-
pathy is taken to play in our social lives, we need a more
precise understanding of this emotional phenomenon. The
intent of this paper is to remedy this lack. Using the notion
of focus of an emotion from theories of emotions (Helm,
2007), I argue that sympathy is not an emotion but a type
of emotional experience and that it refers to all instances of
emotion that have another person as focus. This account
clarifies the structure of sympathy, which emotions it
involves and how the concern is woven into the experience.
It also sheds light on why sympathy is more closely related to
altruistic behavior than empathy.
In the first part, I review existing accounts of sympathy. I
show that although there is a common broad understanding
Corresponding author: Elodie Malbois, Institute for Ethics, History, and the Humanities, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Email: elodie.malbois@unige.ch
ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT
Emotion Review
Vol. 0, No. 0 (November 2022) 1–11
©The Author(s) 2022
ISSN 1754-0739
DOI: 10.1177/17540739221140404
https://journals.sagepub.com/home/emr

of sympathy, it lacks precision and there is disagreement
regarding what emotions it includes. In the second part, I
argue that emotions for others are emotions that have
another person as their focuses. I explain the notion of
focus of an emotion and show how it helps us understand
why other-oriented emotions involve concern for another
and motivate helping behavior. In the third part, I explain
why we should understand sympathy as referring to all
instances of emotion that have another person as focus. I
end by contrasting the affective structure of sympathy with
the one of empathy which illuminates the difference
between them and makes it readily understandable why sym-
pathy motivates helping actions more directly than empathy.
The Current Understanding of Sympathy
While Hume and Smith already used the term “sympathy,”
they understood it in ways that are closer to what we
would call today “empathy”(see Section 4) (Hume, 1738;
Smith, 2010). Scheler made an important contribution to
what we will call “sympathy”here by distinguishing it
from other emotional experiences such as emotional conta-
gion (2017).
2
According to him, sympathy consists in com-
miserating with another in pain and feeling pity/sorry for
her (Mitleid) or in rejoicing with her happiness (Mitfreude)
(Scheler, 2017).
3
Importantly, Scheler specified that when
we sympathize with another, we do not feel that person’s
emotion and we do not take her perspective.
Current accounts of sympathy are in line with Scheler’s:
sympathy is understood as a feeling for another. It is different
from empathy which is a feeling with another that involves
emotional sharing and perspective taking. More precisely,
authors like Darwall, Eisenberg, Coplan, and Maibom
appear to agree with Batson that sympathy consists in
feeling an other-oriented emotional reaction “elicited by
and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone else”
(Batson, 2011, p. 11). Other-oriented emotions have a posi-
tive valence (e.g., happiness, joy, excitement) when the
other’s welfare is perceived as positive, and a negative one
(e.g., sadness, worry, anger) when the other’s welfare is per-
ceived as negative. This includes feeling sorry for someone
who is in pain and happy for someone who has just
reached a long-term goal. By contrast, it does not include
schadenfreude since it is a positive emotional reaction to
someone’s difficulty. There is an array of emotions that can
satisfy the above characterization of other-oriented emotions
including feeling embarrassed, angry, concerned, sad, happy,
and joyful for another. Batson, Darwall, Eisenberg, Coplan,
and Maibom do not agree whether sympathy refers to all
other-oriented emotions, some of them or only one of them.
Batson restricts sympathy, or “empathic concern”
4
as he
calls it, to other-oriented emotions felt for someone in
need. It implies that for him, sympathy involves only emo-
tions with a negative valence like “compassion, softhearted-
ness, tenderness, sorrow, sadness, upset, distress, concern,
and grief”(Batson, 2011, p. 11). Einsenberg, whose defin-
ition of sympathy is also used by Coplan, further restricts
sympathy to “feelings of sorrow or concern for the other”
(Eisenberg & Eggum, 2009, p. 72; Coplan, 2004). This
restriction of sympathy to emotions felt for another in need
makes sense given that both Batson and Eisenberg are psy-
chologists interested in testing whether helping behavior pro-
duced by sympathy is altruistic. Maibom’sdefinition of
sympathy, by contrast, is closer to the one of Scheler and
involves two emotions, one positive and one negative:
Person S sympathizes with person O when S feels sad for O as a result of
believing or perceiving that something bad has happened to O, or S feels
happy for O as a result of believing or perceiving that something good
has happened to O (Maibom, 2017, p. 2)
However, she also seems open to include other feelings
such as the ones Batson mentions (see Maibom, 2020),
which suggests that her definition can potentially be
widened to encompass those. Lastly, Darwall seems to
define sympathy as one discrete emotion:
[Sympathy] is a feeling or emotion that (a) responds to some apparent
threat or obstacle to an individual’s good or wellbeing, (b) has that indi-
vidual himself as object, and (c) involves concern for him, and thus for
his wellbeing, for his sake. (Darwall, 1998, p. 261)
Like Batson and Eisenberg, Darwall restricts sympathy to
situations where the other person’s welfare is perceived as
threatened, but he mentions only concern as a sympathetic
feeling. Hence, while the authors discussed here agree that
feeling sympathy consists in feeling an other-oriented
emotion, they disagree on what it is and what emotions it
involves.
Furthermore, it is not clear what it means for an emotion to
be other-oriented. Batson explains that many emotions have
self- and other-oriented versions (2011, p. 12). Several
authors think that other-oriented versions of emotions have
another person as objects (Darwall 261, Goldie 2000, 213–
214). For instance, when we feel sorry for Alma who just
lost her grandmother, our emotion is about her. This is,
however, not sufficient to characterize other-oriented emo-
tions. Admiration, contempt, schadenfreude, or mockery
usually have another person as their objects but are not other-
oriented in the way feeling sorry for another is.
Other-oriented emotions are also felt on behalf of the other
person and for her sake. How that translates into the structure
of other-oriented emotions is unclear, but it implies that
other-oriented emotions involve concern for the other
person rather than a sharing of the other’s experience
(Coplan, 2004; Darwall, 1998, p. 274). Hence if we feel
sorry for Alma who has just lost her grandmother because
we care about her, our feeling is other-oriented; on the con-
trary, if we feel sorry because it means that Alma will not
be coming to our party, it is not.
2Emotion Review Vol. 0 No. 0

The idea that sympathy is a reaction of concern for the
other explains why other-oriented emotions are “congruent
with the perceived welfare of its object”(Batson, 2011,
p. 11). Since we are concerned about the other person and
want her to be well for her own sake (Darwall, 1998), we per-
ceive her doing well as good and inversely. While we might
be sad for Alma when she loses her grandmother, we will be
happy for her when she finds the perfect apartment she was
looking for.
5
Similarly, since sympathy involves a desire
for that person to be well, it motivates us to help that
person when she is in need. When we feel sorry for Alma,
we want her to be well for her own sake and therefore
want to comfort her. It might motivate us to offer to spend
time with her, to help her around the house, etc. Growing
empirical evidence supports this claim (Batson, 2011;
Eisenberg et al., 1989b; Leiberg et al., 2011). Batson and
his team have conducted a number of studies showing that
sympathy produces altruistic motivation (Batson, 2011).
6
When the cost of helping is not too high, sympathetic sub-
jects tend to act on their motivation to help even if there is
an easy way to escape the situation. This suggests that sym-
pathy is a pro-social attitude that plays an important role in
our social lives.
However, we need to better understand the relation
between sympathy and concern to specify how the former
motivates helping behavior at the psychological level. It is
not clear if concern is part of the emotional experience of
feeling sorry or angry for another, occurring along with it,
or causing it. Batson says that an emotion is other-oriented
if the other person’s“welfare is the focus of the emotion”
(Batson, 2011, p. 12) but does not explain what this means.
He argues, nevertheless, that valuing someone’s welfare is
an antecedent to feeling sympathy for that person (Batson,
2011, p. 33), implying that some form of concern is at least
causally related to sympathy. In what follows, I undertake
to offer a more precise account of sympathy and to elucidate
what emotions it involves and how it relates to concern for
another. I start by clarifying the structure of other-oriented
emotions.
The Structure of Other-Oriented Emotions
What are Other-Oriented Emotions?
To understand better the structure of other-oriented emotions,
let us compare an instance of other-oriented sadness with one
of regular sadness. Imagine that Alma is sad because she has
just been informed that her grandmother, whom she loved
deeply, passed quietly in her sleep last night. Imagine also
that Julia, a friend of Alma, has just learned about Alma’s
loss and feels sorry for her.
7
At first sight, both emotions
seem similar in terms of their particular objects and formal
objects. The particular object of an emotion is what the
emotion is about or directed at, while the formal object is
the evaluative property that is implicitly attributed to the
object in virtue of the emotion felt toward it (Scarantino &
de Sousa, 2021). When I am afraid of going wingsuit
flying, for example, the object of my emotion is going wing-
suit flying and the formal object is dangerousness. It is
because wingsuit flying appears dangerous to me that I
react with fear to the thought of doing it. In the above
example, both Alma and Julia are reacting to the death of
Alma’s grandmother, and both see it as a loss and therefore
are sad. Despite those similarities, Alma’s and Julia’s experi-
ences are quite different. Alma’s sadness is most likely stron-
ger than Julia’s. But most importantly, Alma’s emotion is
about losing her own grandmother, while Julia’s is about
the loss of her friend. Both emotions are about the same
event but have different particular objects.
It might therefore seem that regular emotions have par-
ticular objects that are related to oneself while other-oriented
emotions have objects that are related to someone else. My
fear that I go wingsuit flying is self-oriented whereas my
fear of Zack going wingsuit flying is other-oriented. As we
have seen above, this criterion does not work for emotions
such as admiration, contempt, schadenfreude or mockery
that can have another person as their object but are not felt
for another person’s sake. One might nevertheless think
that there is something particular about these emotions and
that the object criterion still applies to other emotions.
However, if we look at those other emotions, we can see
that this is not the case. We can be personally affected by
an object that is related to someone else and conversely.
For instance, Eloise might be worried for her children’s
sake that her plane crashes while on a business trip. In that
case, what she is worried about is that she gets badly
injured or even dies in a plane crash. The object of her
emotion is directly related to her. However, she is worried
for her children. It is out of concern for them that she is
worried about getting injured in a plane crash because that
possible event appears to her as a threat to her children’s
wellbeing. Conversely, Sirius might be afraid that his
ex-partner gets hurt while wingsuit flying because he needs
them to look after the children the following weekend. In
that case, the object of his emotion is other-related—it is
an event potentially happening to his ex-partner—but he
does not feel worried for his partner’s sake. He is worried
about his ex-partner getting injured mainly because that
would threaten his plans and not because he cares about
them. These two examples suggest that the orientation of
an emotion does not depend on its particular object, but
rather on whom one is concerned about.
One might object that the description of the above exam-
ples is inaccurate and that the object of Eloise’s worry is not
her getting injured in a plane crash, but rather her children not
being well taken care of. Similarly, the object of Sirius’s fear
would not be his ex-partner’s having an accident, but his
plans for the weekend falling out. In that case, these exam-
ples would fail to show that the object of an emotion is insuf-
ficient to determine its orientation. However, this objection
Malbois What is Sympathy 3

fails. The fact that Eloise is worried that her children might
not be well taken care of if something happens to her does
not imply that she is not worried about getting injured in a
plane crash for her children’s sake as well. On the contrary,
it is because she is concerned with her children’s wellbeing
that she also worries for them that she might get injured.
At the time of boarding the plane, she might keep entertain-
ing the possibility of the plane crashing and feel genuinely
worried about it. Denying this would be like claiming that
a law student is not worried about a coming test because
what they are really afraid of is not getting their degree or
not being able to become a lawyer. Although the student’s
desire to pass the test is instrumental to their further aims
—which are objects of further worry—they are still very
much concerned about passing the coming exam. Similarly,
Eloise is worried about getting injured in a plane crash and
Sirius about his ex-partner having an accident even if ultim-
ately Eloise is mainly worried about her children’s wellbeing
and Sirius about being able to go away on a weekend.
One might then accept that Eloise is genuinely worried
about getting injured because she is concerned about her chil-
dren but still doubt that her worry is other-oriented. The fact
that her concern for her children is the reason why she is
worried about getting injured does not imply that her
feeling is other-oriented. Perhaps it is her awareness of that
connection and coexisting feeling of concern for her chil-
dren’s wellbeing that make Eloise’s whole experience
appear to her as being about her children. However,
Eloise’s concern for her children does not merely play a
causal role in her worry about getting injured. Her situation
is different from the one of being afraid of a friendly dog
passing by because we were bitten as a child. In that case,
the previous bad experience with a dog does not need to be
part of the present emotional experience. In fact, we might
not even remember having been bitten by a dog. By contrast,
Eloise’s concern for her children is, in some way, part of her
emotional experience because her fear presents to her the
possibility of getting injured in a plane crash as a threat to
her children’s wellbeing. Objects do not appear to us as dan-
gerous in themselves. They appear to us as dangerous only to
the extent that we perceive them as a threat to someone or
something. For instance, peanuts are dangerous only for
those who are allergic. If there are peanuts at a party but
no one is allergic to them, we will not see them as dangerous
for anyone and will not be afraid of anyone eating them. If we
are allergic, however, we will be afraid of eating peanuts
because they appear to us as dangerous for ourselves. For
whom an object is dangerous is part of the emotional experi-
ence of fear; it gives it an orientation.
8
For instance, let’ssay
that I am babysitting my nephew who is running around in
the living room on a small tricycle and that I am afraid that
he runs into the console. I will experience this fear differently
if he running into the console appears to me as a threat for
himself, for the ceramic statue on the console or for me,
because I would get in trouble with my sister. This will
direct my attention, elicit different thoughts, activate differ-
ent desires, and motivate me to react in different ways (catch-
ing my nephew vs. catching the statue). Hence, Eloise is
afraid of the plane crashing because it appears to her as a
threat to her children and Sirius is afraid of his ex-partner
having an accident because it appears to him as a threat to
his plans for the weekend.
9
Similarly, Alma is sad because
the death of her grandmother appears to her as a loss for
herself, while for Julia, it appears as a loss for Alma. The
object of the emotion is therefore evaluated with regard to
another object that gives the emotion its orientation.
The orientation of an emotion is what some philosophers
call the focus of concern (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001) or simply the
focus of an emotion (Helm, 2007). While the object of an
emotion is what is at the center of our attention during an
emotional experience, the focus is what has “import to the
subject that makes intelligible the evaluation implicit in the
emotion”(Helm, 2007, p. 69). My fear of going wingsuit
flying is intelligible in light of my concern for my own
safety, while anger that my co-worker is late again for our
weekly meeting is intelligible in light of my concern for
my dignity and my desire to be respected. The formal
object of the emotion informs us on how the object and the
focus are related, and it is because of that relation that the
object derives its import from the focus (Helm, 2007).
Wingsuit flying appears to me as a threat to my own
safety, while my co-worker’s lack of punctuality appears to
me as a disrespect to myself. If I did not care about my
safety or my dignity, I would not react emotionally in
those cases. Caring about someone or something
10
disposes
us to feel different emotions depending on how that person
or thing fares in the world (Helm, 2007; Seidman, 2016). It
disposes us to feel afraid for her if she is in danger, relieved
when she is safe, sorry when she is sick, happy when she
meets success, etc.
Other-oriented emotions can therefore be understood as
emotions that have another person as their focus. Often, the
focus of our emotions is ourselves, which is readily under-
standable from context. Therefore, we usually do not need
to specify that we are feeling worried of not passing a test
for ourselves and then that we are excited and relieved of
having passed it for ourselves. When we feel other-oriented
emotions, however, we often point out that we feel the
emotion for another to stress that the emotion is not
self-oriented.
What Emotions can be Other-Oriented?
Interestingly, not all types of emotions can have another
person as their focus. The core characteristics of particular
emotions can constrain what kind of focus they typically
have. The formal object of an emotion plays an important
role in this. For instance, relief is felt when a threat to the
focus of the emotion has disappeared or has been defeated.
Hence, relief is typically only felt for something that we
4Emotion Review Vol. 0 No. 0

can value and that can be threatened. For example, we can
feel relieved that the fire in the Amazon Forest has been
extinguished, that the ball didn’t hit the precious ceramic
statue, or that the child who fell into a well has been found
alive, to the extent that they have some value to us and are
the type of entities that can be threatened. However, a math-
ematical equation or a conceptual truth can hardly be the
focus of relief. Similarly, admiration is an emotion felt for
an object that displays a certain type of virtue or excellence
(Roberts, 2003). This suggests that its focus is typically a
type of virtue or excellence.
11
This implies that another
person is not an appropriate focus for admiration, and it is
difficult to understand what it would mean to admire
Mother Theresa for another person’s sake.
For some emotions, it is rather straightforward whether
they typically can have another person as focus or not.
Sadness, anger, fear and joy and their close relatives (disap-
pointment, indignation, worry, etc.)
12
can easily be felt for
others, unlike surprise, contempt and admiration which are
not felt for anyone’s sake. For other emotions such as guilt,
shame, and pride, it is not so easy to determine if their
focus can be a person. Guilt is often thought as the perception
of a behavior of ours (action, thought, and desire) as having
flouted a norm (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001; Deonna & Teroni, 2008). I
feel guilty of not having recycled my bottle of water because
I consider that doing so is a social or perhaps even a moral
norm. This suggests that the typical focus of guilt is a
(social, personal, cultural, moral, …) norm. However, it
might also seem that when we feel guilty for having hurt
someone we love, we do not feel it out of concern for the
norm “do not hurt others”but out of concern for the
person, we have hurt.
Furthermore, guilt, shame, and pride seem to have other
characteristics that prevent them from being other-oriented.
For example, shame can be understood as an object appear-
ing as undermining one’s respectability or worthiness
(Roberts, 2003). Carlos is ashamed of the scar on his face
because he perceives it as undermining his aesthetic value
and therefore his overall value. We might think that the
focus of shame could be someone else’s value or image,
but shame is usually considered a self-construal, i.e., it is
only oriented toward ourselves (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001; Roberts,
2003; Deonna & Teroni, 2008). Thus, we can be ashamed
of others only to the extent that it is “casting disgrace on
oneself”either as an individual or as a group (a team, a
nation, etc.) (Roberts, 2003, p. 227). The same might be
the case with pride if it consists in seeing an object as con-
firming or enhancing our own worth (Roberts, 2003). In
the case of guilt, even if its focus could be a person, its
typical object further restricts the possibility of feeling it
for others because guilt is about our own behavior. This
might be why we typically do not feel guilty for others
when they have breached a rule.
However, we seem to feel instances of pride or shame that
are more appropriate to another’s situation. It might be that
those emotions have been mischaracterized and can have
another person as focus. Another possibility is that they are
in fact not genuinely other-oriented. They might be instances
of empathy (see Section 4). For instance, the shame or
embarrassment we feel when our friend is relating how he
made a fool of himself might not be embarrassment for
him, but embarrassment with him (see Section 4). It is also
possible that we identify with the other person and that
there is a self-other overlap. The pride that we feel for a
child or a spouse might then be due to the fact that we see
them as somehow part of ourselves. The fact that we typically
do not feel pride, shame, and guilt for strangers although we
can easily feel sad, concerned or happy for them supports
these hypotheses. Whether pride and shame can be other-
oriented is therefore not clear. Since the core characteristics
of many emotions are still debated, further work is required
to determine precisely what emotions can have another
person as focus.
Other-Oriented Emotions and Concern
We are now in a position to discuss how other-oriented emo-
tions involve concern for others. To do that, it is important to
clarify what “concern for others”means. Here, I do not
understand it as an emotion of the type of worry, but rather
as others being a matter of interest and a preoccupation. In
other words, I understand it as caring about others. In this
context, I will use the terms “valuing”“caring about”and
“being concerned”interchangeably.
As we have seen, emotions arise when we perceive a sig-
nificant change to something that is of import to us
(Ben-Ze’ev, 2001; Goldie, 2000; Helm, 2007). Hence, our
values dispose us to feel certain emotions depending on
how they fare and thereby play a causal role in the elicitation
of emotions.
13
Julia’s sadness for Alma informs us that she
cares about Alma and that she is disposed to be worried for
her if she is in danger, happy for her if she is well, etc.
This is in line with Batson’s claim that valuing is an ante-
cedent of other-oriented emotions (2011). However, as
explained above, our care for others does not merely cause
emotions for others; it is part of the emotional experience
itself. Liliana’s preoccupation with her look is at the heart
of her shame; Julia’s preoccupation with Alma’s wellbeing
is part of her sadness for her. Julia appears to her as
someone she values and who has suffered a loss. When we
feel an emotion for someone, that person appears to us as a
value to safeguard or promote. Helm says about self-oriented
emotions that “in feeling an emotion, the import of one’s situ-
ation impresses itself upon one”(Helm, 2007, p. 60). In
other-oriented emotions, it is the other person’s import that
impresses itself upon us. It is in that sense that concern is
part of the other-oriented emotional experience itself.
This enlightens why other-oriented emotions motivate
helping actions. It is widely agreed that emotions motivate
actions, although how they do so is still disputed (Frijda,
Malbois What is Sympathy 5

1986; Kenny & Kenny, 2003; Scarantino, 2014; Deonna &
Teroni, 2012; Tappolet, 2016). Emotions motivate us to act
in a way that is compatible with the evaluations they
involve (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001, p. 61). For example, disgust can
motivate us to move away from the disgusting object,
anger to act in a way to bring justice, reparation or retaliation,
and sadness to look for comfort. When we feel fear for
someone else, we are concerned about them in the sense
that this person’s safety is presented to us as valuable and
as needed to be safeguarded. As a result, we are motivated
to prevent that event, for instance by grabbing our child’s
hand when crossing the road.
14
Whether we act on that
motivation will depend on other factors: we might not have
the means to help that person, we might have a stronger
motivation to help someone we value more, or the helping
action might appear too costly for us. Nevertheless, we will
be motivated to help and in situations where there is no com-
peting motivation, we will act on that motivation.
Other-Oriented Emotions for Strangers
How much we care about another person impacts how we
react emotionally to what happens to them. Our emotional
reactions are stronger for a loved one than for a distant
acquaintance in the same situation. The more we care
about someone, and the longer and more often we will also
pay attention to that person (Helm, 2010) and therefore feel
emotions for them. Similarly, we are willing to do more to
help those we care about more. However, we do not need
to care about another a lot to feel emotions for them. We
usually value at least minimally the wellbeing of strangers
if we do not have reasons to dislike them and we react emo-
tionally to their perceived wellbeing (Batson, 2011). For
instance, we will feel afraid for a motorcyclist who just had
an accident and is lying on the road in front of our eyes
and feel happy for a couple who just got engaged at the res-
taurant. Since we care about strangers very little by compari-
son with other people and other things in our lives, we might
not react emotionally toward others if we are preoccupied
with other things. Furthermore, when we do feel other-
oriented emotions for them, our reaction will usually be
less intense and short. We might never give another
thought about the couple who got engaged after leaving the
restaurant and as a result might never feel emotions for
them again. Nevertheless, if we were to learn by chance
that the motorcyclist is well after all, we would likely feel
some relief for them, and we would feel sorry for the
couple if we learned that their engagement was broken,
even if very mildy. Hence, the dispositions involved with
caring for others are weaker for people we care very little
about, but they exist, nonetheless.
In this part, I have argued that other-oriented emotions are
instances of emotions that have another person as focus.
They involve concern for that person in the sense that we
feel emotions for others that we value, and those emotions
present us those people as a value to safeguard or promote.
This is also why other-oriented emotions are pro-social and
motivate altruistic actions when the other person is in need.
Since sympathy is an other-oriented emotion, this explains
why sympathy involves concern for the other and motivates
helping actions. However, it is still not clear how sympathy
relates to other-oriented emotions.
Sympathy—How to Conceive of It?
We can now address the question of how to conceive of sym-
pathy. We have seen that Batson, Darwall, Eisenberg,
Coplan, and Maibom agree that sympathy is an other-
oriented emotional phenomenon that is felt for another and
that involves concern for that person. However, they disagree
on what emotions constitute sympathy: Darwall seems to
conceive of it as one discrete emotion (1998), others as hap-
piness and sadness (Maibom, 2014; Scheler, 2017), as
sorrow and concern (Coplan, 2004; Eisenberg & Eggum,
2009), and Batson as any other-oriented emotions felt for
someone in need (2011). We might want to determine who
is right.
However, doing so makes sense only if their disagreement
is not a mere verbal dispute and that they really disagree
about how to define the same phenomenon. Since the term
“sympathy”has been used to refer to different emotional phe-
nomena and what we have been calling “sympathy”is named
differently depending on the disciplines, considerations per-
taining to the common use of the term, its etymology, or how
it has been used by philosophers in the past cannot help us
discriminate between the possible conceptions of sympathy.
This implies that to determine which conception of sympathy
is the best or the correct one, we need to look at the thing
itself. But what would that thing be? Darwall seems to con-
ceive of sympathy as an emotion on its own, but it is not clear
that such an emotion exists. If it does, it should be possible to
describe its distinct phenomenology, formal object, and
action readiness. Darwall does not provide such a detailed
account and it is not obvious what it would look like.
Batson’s decision to restrict sympathy to other-oriented emo-
tions for someone in need is merely practical and contextual
and the other authors provide no justification for restricting
sympathy to one or two emotions. Hence, it is not clear
what the phenomenon of sympathy is and the decision to
conceive of it as only one other-oriented emotion or a par-
ticular subset of them appears to be an arbitrary decision or
at best a pragmatic one based on the needs of the research
context.
This suggests that a good conception of sympathy is first
and foremost a useful one. Therefore, I suggest conceiving of
sympathy as referring to all instances of emotion that have
another person as their focus. On this conception, sympathy
is not a particular emotion. It involves feeling sorry for,
happy for, worried for, angry for another and many other
closely related feelings. This wide conception helps clarify
6Emotion Review Vol. 0 No. 0

the landscape of emotions. First, it enables us to distinguish
those other-oriented emotions, which are pro-social, from the
self-oriented ones, which are not. Other-oriented emotions
motivate us to contribute to the wellbeing of others either
by helping them when they are in need or by celebrating
with them when something good happens to them, etc.
Other-oriented emotions are also perceived both by the
subject and others as expressions of concern and thereby
help us create or sustain bonds with them. Other-oriented
emotions thus play an important social role, and it is useful
to have a concept to identify them. Second, this conception
of sympathy provides us with a specific feature that helps
us to distinguish other-oriented emotions from empathic
ones. Although both types of emotional reactions are more
appropriate to another’s situation than our own (Hoffman,
2001) and can easily be confused, they have different struc-
tures and action tendencies (see next section). Hence, having
a concept for each and understanding sympathy as referring
to all other-oriented emotions is useful.
More restricted conceptions of sympathy as a subset of
other-oriented emotions can still be useful in particular research
contexts such as research on helping behavior and altruism.
Otherwise, a more general conception of sympathy as referring
to all instances of emotion that have another person as focus will
be more useful to differentiate between different types of affect-
ive experience.
Sympathy and Empathy—Distinguishing the Two
While there is extensive literature on empathy, the term has
been used in many ways, giving rise to much debate and con-
fusion. Today, the following phenomena are most often dis-
tinguished from one another:
- Affective empathy: feeling what another person is
feeling while remaining aware of the self-other distinction
and that one’s feelings are the other’s, so to speak (de
Vignemont & Singer, 2006; Maibom, 2017)
- Emotional contagion: feeling what one or several people
are feeling without being aware that we are feeling it
because of them, e.g., becoming joyful when arriving at
a party where people are having a good time (Darwall,
1998; Scheler, 2017; Stueber, 2010)
- Perspective-taking: imagining what another person is
experiencing (other-imagining) or what we would experi-
ence if we were in another person’s situation (self-
imagining). (Coplan, 2011; Jackson et al., 2014; Lamm
et al., 2007)
- Personal or empathic distress: becoming distressed when
faced with another person’s suffering (Decety, 2020;
Singer & Klimecki, 2014)
- Sympathy: see previous sections
Some authors use the term “empathy”to refer to one of these
processes or to several of them. For example, Hoffman as
well as Preston and de Waal find that a wide conception of
empathy that encompasses all of the above is more useful
in their research contexts (Hoffman, 2001; Preston & Waal,
2002). In phenomenology, the concept of empathy is used
in a complete different way and refers to a particular type
of intentionality—a mode of consciousness like imagination
or perception—that enables us to directly experience some
mental states of others and to understand them (Gallagher,
2008; Schloßberger, 2020; Zahavi, 2001).
My interest here is in empathy conceived as affective
empathy.
15
It is especially interesting to compare it with sym-
pathy because both are emotional experiences—unlike per-
spective taking—and are about another person and not
ourselves—unlike emotional contagion and personal dis-
tress. Furthermore, both are more appropriate to another
person’s situation and can be instantiated through different
emotions. Although this makes empathy and sympathy
quite close, they are clearly distinct in two ways. First,
empathy consists in feeling what another person is feeling
and therefore requires some similarity between what the
other person and we are experiencing.
16
By contrast, we
can feel a sympathetic emotion for someone whose experi-
ence is quite different, such as feeling worried for someone
who is going wingsuit flying and who is excited about it.
Second, empathy, unlike sympathy, does not involve
concern for another, although empirical evidence shows
that empathy often elicits sympathy (Batson, 2011; Lamm
et al., 2007). The above account of the structure of sympa-
thetic emotions is helpful to further untangle how an
empathic and a sympathetic experience of the same
emotion differ, also shedding light on why empathy does
not directly motivate helping behavior.
As we have seen, when we feel sympathy, we react to
what is happening to another out of concern for them.
What emotion we feel depends on how we evaluate the
other person’s situation: we feel afraid for the other person
if she appears to us as being in danger, angry if she
appears to us as having been offended, etc. This implies
that we are not looking at the other’s situation from their
own point of view, but from ours. Also, sympathetic emo-
tions are for others in the sense that they always have
another person as their focus.
By contrast, in empathy, we feel the other person’s
emotion as if we were that person or as if we were in her situ-
ation. In addition, we interpret that emotion as being what the
other person is feeling, and project it onto them. We do not
feel it from our own perspective, but from the perspective
of the other person. This appears clearly when we feel
empathy as a result of perspective-taking. If I take Alma’s
perspective and imagine that I am Alma and that I have
lost my grandmother, I will feel sad about it. In that case, I
feel sadness for “myself”for having lost “my”grandmother.
But I remain aware that I am imagining being Alma and that
the subject—the Iof this imaginative experience—is Alma.
This is also the case, although less clearly, when we feel
Malbois What is Sympathy 7

empathy without perspective-taking, as a result of witnessing
a person in a certain situation or believing that they are in that
situation (Lamm et al., 2007; Maibom, 2018; Preston &
Waal, 2002). When I meet with Alma and see how sad she
is, I might automatically feel her sadness without having to
imaginatively put myself in her shoes. Even in that case,
however, my sadness is felt from Alma’s perspective in the
sense that it is sadness felt “for myself”for having lost
“my”grandmother, where the Iis still interpreted as
Alma’s. Hence, in empathy, we feel the emotion from the
other person’s perspective and not our own and we project
that emotion on the other person. Empathy is other-oriented
in the sense that the emotional experience is about another
person, but in a different way than sympathy.
The emotion felt in empathy will often have the subject as
focus, but not necessarily. When I empathize with Alma, I
feel sadness for “myself,”but imagine that I am Alma.
However, I might also empathize with a parent who is
feeling worried for their child. In that case, I imagine that I
am the parent feel the worry for the child. But regardless of
whether the focus of the emotion is the self or another, it is
not felt from our own perspective and the concern felt for
“ourselves”or “the child”is not genuinely ours. This is
what fundamentally distinguishes empathy from sympathy.
This difference in perspective explains why empathy and
sympathy produce different motivations to act. When we
empathize with another person’s self-oriented emotion, that
emotion presents ourselves as being in danger, offended,
experiencing a loss, etc. and motivates us to safeguard or
promote our own wellbeing. But since we are also aware
that it is not our own emotion and that we are not in the
other person’s situation, that motivation remains idle.
17
Hence, unlike sympathy, empathy does not directly motivate
us to do anything, just like imagining that we are being
chased by a lion does not motivate us to start running.
This does not imply that empathy has no impact on us.
Putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes can help us under-
stand experientially what another person is feeling (Coplan,
2011). If that person is suffering or in danger and we value
her, we might come to feel sympathy for her and/or be moti-
vated to help her. Empathy then plays an epistemic role rather
than a motivating one (Maibom, 2017). This is consistent
with research showing that empathy often leads to sympathy
(Batson, 2011; Eisenberg & Fabes, 1990; Singer & Klimecki,
2014). In fact, perspective-taking, which leads to empathy, is
often used to elicit sympathy for strangers in need in lab
experiments (Batson, 2011). Batson provides a causal
explanation for the connection between empathy and
sympathy:
Batson, Eklund et al. (2007, Experiment 2) found that increased valuing
of another’s welfare led to the spontaneous adoption of an imagine-other
perspective, which in turn led to increased empathic concern [sympathy].
The downstream location of perspective taking explains why it can
effectively induce empathic concern [sympathy] for someone in need.
Even in the absence of prior valuing, it activates the valuing path.
(Batson, 2011, p. 44)
It remains, however, unclear why perspective-taking and
hence empathy retro-activated the valuing path, especially
at the psychological level.
Interestingly, empirical evidence shows that empathy can
also lead to personal distress (Batson et al., 1987; Decety &
Lamm, 2011; Eisenberg et al., 1989a; Eisenberg & Fabes,
1990). Personal distress is a self-oriented reaction of distress
to another’s suffering (Singer & Klimecki, 2014) which
motivates one to take care of oneself (Batson, 2011). Given
what we have said about empathy, it is not surprising that
it can lead to personal distress. Often, empathizing involves
experiencing distress for ourselves that we project onto the
other person. If the emotional experience is strong, we
might start focusing on our feelings only and stop projecting
it. We would thereby lose track of the fact that it is not our
emotion that we are feeling (Decety & Lamm, 2011;
Eisenberg & Eggum, 2009). Then, our self-oriented distress
would motivate us to take care of ourselves since we would
perceive ourselves as in need. This tends to happen when we
are not good at self-regulating, i.e., at controlling how we
focus and shift our attention (Eisenberg & Eggum, 2009).
Evidence also shows that personal distress is more likely to
arise if we imagine ourselves in the other person’s situation
rather than if we imagine what the other person is feeling
(Lamm et al., 2007).
Empathy thus differs from sympathy in that the emotional
experience is felt from the other person’s point of view and
projected onto them, while sympathy is felt from our own
point of view and always has another person as focus. As a
result, empathy does not directly motivate helping behavior
but can indirectly do so by informing us on the other
person’s experience and leading to sympathy. However,
empathy can also lead to personal distress motivating us to
withdraw and take care of ourselves.
Conclusion
In this paper, I have argued that sympathy should be under-
stood as referring to all instances of emotion that have
another person as focus. In other words, when we feel sym-
pathy for another person, that person is presented to us as an
object that we value and that is in danger, offended, experi-
encing a loss, etc., depending on our appraisal of that
person’s situation. As a result, when we perceive the other
person as in need, we are readily motivated to help her.
That understanding of sympathy clarifies its structure and
explains why it can take the form of different emotions and
involves concern for the other. I also contrasted sympathy
with empathy and explained that empathy involves feeling
an emotion from the other person’s perspective and project-
ing that emotion onto them. Because the emotion experi-
enced in empathy is not interpreted as “ours”, its
8Emotion Review Vol. 0 No. 0

motivational tendencies become idle. However, if that emo-
tional experience is strong, we might lose the awareness that
it is not “ours”, leaving us feeling distressed and needing to
take care of ourselves. It remains nevertheless unclear how
empathy leads to sympathy and more research is needed to
understand how they are connected.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Maude Ouellette-Dubé and Florian Cova as well as two
anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this
paper.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was sup-
ported by the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der
Wissenschaftlichen Forschung, (grant number NCCR Evolving Language,
Agreement #51NF40_180888, P2FRP1_199616).
ORCID iD
Elodie Malbois https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6534-9893
Notes
1. What is called “sympathy”by philosophers is also called “empathic
concern”(Batson, 2011), “compassion”(Singer & Klimecki, 2014)
or even “empathy”(Hoffman, 2001) in other disciplines.
2. Scheler uses the term “sympathy”to refer to all these experiences.
What I call “sympathy”here is Scheler’sMiteinanderfühlen, which
is a type of fellow-feeling (see Scheler, 2017; Schloßberger, 2016).
3. However, Scheler specified that sympathy does not imply that we get in
a sorrowful or “joyful mood”ourselves (Scheler, 2017, p. 42). To see
why that is, we need to understand Scheler’s theory of feelings and the
difference he made between different classes of feelings. This intricate
matter is beyond the scope of the paper, but see Schloßberger, 2016 for
a detailed account.
4. Although Batson uses the term “empathic concern”and not “sym-
pathy”, it appears from his description that we are talking about the
same emotional phenomenon: emotions felt for another, that are con-
gruent with our perceived welfare of the other person and are felt out
of concern for another. He also explicitly says that empathic concern
is what Darwall calls “sympathy”(Batson, 2011). Empathic concern
and sympathy have been often considered synonymous in recent litera-
ture (Darwall, 1998; Decety, 2020; Maibom, 2017; Singer & Klimecki,
2014).
5. However, although the valence of our other-oriented emotion will often
match the one of the other person’s experience, it is not necessarily the
case since our evaluations of the situation might differ, as exemplified
in the introduction. While Sarah might be very disappointed that she
was not selected to join the first crew going to Mars, we might feel
happy about it, knowing how dangerous the trip to Mars is.
6. Although the evidence collected by Batson and his colleagues is com-
pelling, whether it conclusively shows that empathic concern produces
altruistic motivation is still disputed. See Cialdini et al., 1987, 1997;
Sober & Wilson, 1999.
7. In addition to her sympathetic sadness, Julia might also empathetically
feel Alma’s sadness, making it difficult to distinguish the two experi-
ences. Furthermore, if because of her grandmother’s death, Julia has
to cancel a trip with Alma that she had been planning for a long
time, Julia might feel sad about that as well, adding to the confusion.
For the sake of the following analysis, let’sfirst assume that there is
nothing sad for Julia herself in this situation and let’s focus on
Julia’s experience of sympathetic sadness alone. We can do that by
mentally abstracting it from the empathetic sadness or by imagining
what Julia is feeling when she considers Alma’s situation without
taking her perspective. If one finds that difficult, the example can be
modified so that Alma is not feeling sad, but angry that her grand-
mother was taken away from her. In that case, Julia might still feel sym-
pathetically sad for Alma, but will experience empathetic anger rather
than sadness. The two experiences will then be more clearly distin-
guishable and comparable.
8. This understanding of emotions as having an orientation is similar to
Helm’s (2007). His notion of focus of an emotion is introduced in
the next paragraph.
9. This view appears to be in line with Nanay’s account of vicarious emo-
tions (2013, 2018). It is, however, not clear if he would agree with the
rest of my account of other-oriented emotions and of sympathy.
10. Since we can also value material and abstract objects for themselves
such as works of art, sentimental objects, peace, democracy, it
follows that they can be the focuses of our emotions as well. For
instance, I can fear the visit of my nephews for the sake of my
ceramic statue, and I can be relieved that antique statues have been
spared by the war in Syria for their own sake. However, not all
formal objects are appropriate for objects: it is difficult to imagine
feeling embarrassed for the vase or angry for the statues. Although
related, emotions for objects do not directly pertain to sympathy and
will not be further explored here.
11. Admiration has also been described as a person-focused (as opposed to
act-focused) emotion (Bell, 2011; Kauppinen, 2019). However, it does
not seem that in this context the term “focus”is understood as an object
of import that makes the emotional reaction intelligible.
12. The focus can be either a person herself or something related to her
such as her safety, her image, her integrity, etc. to the extent that
they ultimately show concern for that person.
13. For a discussion of whether and how dispositions can be causes, see
Alvarez, 2017; Choi & Fara, 2018.
14. Whether this helping behavior constitutes altruism is a further question.
It is possible that in such cases non-altruistic motivations such as guilt
avoidance contribute more strongly to motivate helping behavior
(Sober & Wilson, 1999). Our helping action might also not be altruistic
if we care about others because we feel a sense of oneness with them
(Cialdini et al., 1997).
15. Although I will refer to affective empathy as “empathy”for brevity
purposes, I am not arguing that it is the best or the right definition of
empathy. I am also not making any claims about the role that
empathy as affective empathy plays in our social lives and whether it
is our most fundamental or efficient way of learning about others’
mental states. For a discussion of these questions, see for example
Gallagher, 2008; Goldman, 2002; Schloßberger, 2020; Zahavi, 2011.
16. There is no agreement on how close our experience needs to be to the
other’s in affective empathy and the limit is rarely clearly set. However,
some perceived similarity is characteristic of affective empathy. At the
very least, the empathizer has to think that her experience is more or
less similar to what the other person is experiencing (Maibom, 2017).
17. This contrasts with the commonly held view that empathy (directly)
motivates pro-social behavior (see for instance Hoffman 2001).
However, when engaging with this literature, one should keep in
mind that empathy is often not conceived as referring strictly to affect-
ive empathy. For a discussion regarding how affective empathy specif-
ically might motivate altruistic and moral behavior in general, see
Schramme, 2017.
Malbois What is Sympathy 9

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