Empathy vs. Sympathy

     The way we defined empathy in class is having the intellectual identification or vicarious experience of the feelings/thoughts/attitudes of another. Another definition we gave empathy is having the experience of understanding anothers condition from their perspective. The way we defined sympathy is feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune.

     An example of using empathy would be using your imagination and thinking about the situation that someone is in. Even though you may not have experienced the same thing, you can imagine yourself in the situation and try to understand emotions they may feel.

It would be important for someone who is studying history to be able to empathize because they study other people lives and events they went through on a daily basis. They should be able to put themselves in other people's shoes because it would help them to have a more accurate representation of past events to convey to the people they are trying to teach.