Cultivating Empathy I saw empathy as being the same emotion as sympathy. I didn’t think there was much of a difference until we started to define both terms and found ourselves relating to the text read for class. Reading these texts, The Woman Worrier by Maxine Hong Kingston and Oryx and Crake by Margret Atwood, have helped me to understand that empathy is how we connect to the text topics. Sympathy is to feel for the person while empathy is feeling what the person feels. I know what it feels like to put myself in another person’s “shoes”. Therefore, another way of describing empathy is for it to be, “defined as the ability to access and respond to the inner world of another person” (Oliveira 97). My new understanding of empathy has …show more content…
I feel that my outlook on empathy has changed and that I feel as though I understand it and can now depict empathy from sympathy. I know that we must show empathy towards nature before it destroys us. We can become better through changing the way we feel about society and how we approach science. Work Cited Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. Anchor, 2004. Accessed 9 Feb 2018. Guney, Burcu G. and Hayati, Seker. "The Use of History of Science as a Cultural Tool to Promote Students' Empathy with the Culture of Science." Educational Sciences: Theory and Practice, vol. 12, no. 1, 01 Dec. 2012, pp. 533-539. EBSCOhost, proxy.eckerd.edu:5000/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ978457&site=eds-live&scope=site. Accessed 13 Feb 2018. Helen Riess, MD. "The Science of Empathy." Journal of Patient Experience, Vol 4, Iss 2, pp. 74-77 (2017), no. 2, 2017, p. 74. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1177/2374373517699267. Accessed 13 Feb 2018. Oliveira, Silva Patrícia, et al. "Empathy by Default: Correlates in the Brain at Rest." Psicothema, vol. 30, no. 1, Jan. 2018, pp. 97-103. EBSCOhost, doi:10.7334/psicothema2016.366. Accessed 13 Feb