Construct · 4 fields · 7 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, four constructs Nearest construct by meaningsentimentcompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to sympathy is sentiment.
Hold this as a prompt, not a verdict. Two constructs sitting close in meaning is a reason to read them side by side and decide for yourself whether they are one idea under two names. It is not proof that they are. Compare the meanings in the Collider.
Spokes are fields; dashed arcs are shared lineage. Tap a field for its definition, unit, and measures.
Drag to watch the word get claimed. Each field appears at the publication date of the earliest source cited for it. Tap a year to see which.
In physics the word names sympathetic resonance: when one vibrating body drives a second body that can oscillate at the same frequency, the second builds up motion of its own even though nothing touches it. Galileo's 1638 Dialogues concerning two new sciences gave the first physical account, describing how a struck string and a pendulum can set matched neighbours moving. Helmholtz's 1863 On the sensations of tone then treated it quantitatively as the response of a resonator to a driving frequency near its own. The referent is a purely mechanical coupling of oscillators, and it carries none of the feeling or moral content that the word takes in philosophy and psychology.[1][2]
In moral philosophy the word names the capacity by which one person comes to share another's feelings, and which is taken to ground approval and blame. Hume's 1739 A treatise of human nature made sympathy the principle by which sentiments are communicated from one mind to another and turned into moral responses. Adam Smith's 1759 The theory of moral sentiments refined it as an act of imagination in which a spectator places himself in another's situation and judges from that borrowed point of view. Here the referent is a general mechanism for transmitting any feeling and forming moral judgments, broader than the felt concern that psychology later isolated and unrelated to the physical coupling studied in acoustics.[3][4]
In psychology the word names an other-oriented emotion: a feeling of sorrow or concern for another who is suffering, held apart from empathy, which is feeling what the other feels. Wispé's 1986 paper argued that psychology had blurred the two words and set out sympathy as heightened awareness of another's plight together with an urge to relieve it. Eisenberg and Fabes's 1990 work built the measurement program that treats sympathy as distinct from both empathy and personal distress, and links it to helping. The referent is a specific felt response to distress, narrower than the general fellow-feeling of moral philosophy and with nothing in common with resonance in physics.[5][6]
In anthropology of religion, sympathy refers to sympathetic magic, Frazer's term for magic resting on likeness or contact, which assumes that things act on each other at a distance. This meaning comes from Frazer (1922) in The Golden Bough.[7]
Next
See how sympathy sits against neighbouring constructs in the Collider, or export every reference on this page in one click.
Open in ColliderExport BibTeXReport this collisionCited on this page?
If your work is cited behind one of these entries, you know better than we do whether we captured the meaning right. Confirm it, suggest an edit, or dispute it, and your name goes on the entry as an author who has checked it, linked to your ORCID.
Claim your construct