Quote:
Originally Posted by RogueWolf
wrong empathy is not 'an emotion' empathy is emotion for others, people get empathy and emotion mixed up and it's stupid thing to do. There is nothing anywhere that ever suggested that physcopaths do not feel emotion but dumb people confuse empathy with emotion and generalise that physcopath
s have no emotion which is stupid and totally false, no being can exsist without emotion and noone would bother to kill or harm anyone unless they had emotions- there would be no point. Physcopaths can have a lack of empathy but do not lack emotion at all, in fact they can probably feel more emotion than average people which explains physcopaths who kill for power, thrills,sexual release or other emotion based reasons
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I agree that psychopaths/sociopaths have emotion. I did not elude to them not having any at all. I will put my point in different words starting with the definition of empathy based on
Dictionary and Thesaurus - Merriam-Webster Online.
em·pa·thy noun \ˈem-pə-thē\
: the feeling that you understand and share another person's experiences and emotions : the ability to share someone else's feelings
EasyBib
Full Definition of EMPATHY
1
: the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it
2
: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also : the capacity for this
So yes, one could argue that empathy itself is not an emotion. However, when you are empathizing, you are feeling what the other person feels. That makes emotion a necessary component of empathy. I think that sociopaths/psychopaths can understand and comprehend what someone is feeling based on previous experiences and what they have been told is the explanation of the feeling, but can not experience it with them. I also think the latter part of that is only on a logical understanding of the definition based on understanding of the language, but not on a personal level of experience if it is something they have not experienced. For example; if they have never experienced the pain of being betrayed, they would not "know" what it was like because they would only have the definition to rely on rather than experiencing the actual feeling. You can put together pieces of what a color is when someone says the color coral looks like a bit of red mixed with a bit of pink and kinda peach like. You know what all those colors are, and you can "imagine" what coral must look like based on that, but it's not the full picture and not accurate until you see the actual color, coral. I also think that because the comprehension is there, but not the feelings, there is something missing in the "link". This may be related to bonding. I'm not a psychiatrist, just theorizing on what makes sense to me.