empathy
n. uncountablen. the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. You show this when you can put yourself in someone else's shoes and feel what they are going through.
n. the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference. It involves the psychological identification with the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
A good nurse shows empathy when listening to a sick patient.
The manager handled the employee's personal crisis with deep empathy, offering extra time off and a listening ear.
True empathy requires more than mere sympathy; it demands the cognitive and emotional effort to step outside one's own perspective and inhabit the lived reality of another.
A twentieth-century borrowing from Ancient Greek ἐμπάθεια (empátheia, literally “passion”) (formed from ἐν (en, “in, at”) + πάθος (páthos, “feeling”)), equivalent to em- + -pathy, coined by Edward Bradford Titchener in 1909 to translate German Einfühlung. The modern word in Greek εμπάθεια (empátheia) has an opposite meaning denoting strong negative feelings and prejudice against someone.
Frequently pairs with the prepositions 'for' or 'with' to indicate the target of the emotion.