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Make Connections The Greek word pathos meant feeling. It’s the root of sympathy (which came from roots that meant “together feeling”) and empathy (“in feeling”). There’s also a word that means “I don’t care”— apathy . The root words of this word mean “without feeling.”

What Are Empat hy and Compas s ion?

If you start laughing when you see someone else laughing, you feel amused, even if you don’t know why. You think the other person’s laughter is funny. Amusement is your emotion. Now say, you start crying as you listen to your friend tell her story about her breakup with her boyfriend. In order for the feeling to be empathy, you have to see that your friend is in pain and share her pain, while at the same time you know that it’s not your own emotion you’re feeling. You’re not the one who was hurt. The pain that you’re feeling is for your friend, not for yourself. Having empathy isn’t always enough, though. It doesn’t neces- sarily mean we’ll do anything but feel bad. It doesn’t mean we’ll help the person who’s hurting. Psychologist Paul Ekman, an expert on emotions research, says that there are actually three kinds of empathy—and only one of them will actually trigger us to take positive action. The first form he calls “ cognitive empathy.” This means when you see someone who is hurting, you recognize what he’s feeling. You saw the kid on the bus with tears in his eyes, and you could tell he was sad. You might use this knowledge to help—but you could also use it to manipulate the other person to your own ad- vantage. Cognitive empathy can be selfish. Which is why Ekman says we also need what he calls “emo- tional empathy”—when we physically feel what other people feel. But even this can have a downside. Say when you see the kid on the bus crying, you get so upset that you’re a mess for the rest of the day. You don’t want to talk to your friends. You can’t focus