You can get the illusion by playing a game where your sprite is 1 pixel high and you shoot 1 pixel high bullets on a horizontal plane, you can only move left and right and 1 pixel high enemies come at you.
compassion = empathy.... of which I have too much, and incidentally is the fundamental emotional basis of good acting, for all you actors out there. yes I skipped 3 pages cause words
So, if you can get angry, then you have some form of empathy, because you can fathom the idea of emotions.
No, because that's still your own emotions. The key to understanding empathy is that it is about how one relates to others on an emotional level, it has almost nothing to do with the self. If an emotion involves empathy, one way to look at it is to ask if a full-blown sociopath can feel it. If they can, then the emotion doesn't involve empathy and if they can't, chances are good it does involve empathy.
Seriously though, empathy is understanding emotions which I corrected to compassion which means giving a fuck, essentially.
It's not nearly as complex as you all describe it. Just understand where people are coming from and that's it. (in before imspartacus barges in and pisses autism all over 'where people are coming from')
Yeah... compassion is about whether you care - i.e. how "kind" you are. Empathy is simply about comprehension. You can use it to torture someone or to help them, your choice.
Christ, you guys are terrible at this. Empathy is both understanding and comprehending someone elses feelings on a PERSONAL level. This goes beyond just making the connection that Person A feels bad because B happened. To have empathy implies the reciprocation of feels towards others. If someone is sad, you comfort them, if a person is happy, you're happy with them, generally not to the same degree as they are though. Compassion is a feeling of want to alleviate other peoples troubles that arises from strong feelings of empathy. Helping out a friend who needs some money, putting a person up for the night or taking someone to the hospital are all examples of compassion; active work to dissipate the suffering of others. Sociopaths by definition lack empathy and everything that comes with it. That includes compassion, guilt, remorse, sympathy and the like. Nonetheless, most of them CAN understand others feelings and use this to their own ends, but they lack the reciprocation part of empathy.