Sympathy vs. Empathy

I learned that the definition of empathy is the intellectual identification or vicarious experience of the feelings or thought or attitudes of another person, or the experience of understanding another person's condition from their perspective. I also learned that the definition of sympathy is the feeling of pity or sorrow for someone else's misfortune. This is an important distinction because this shows that empathy does not require someone ti have been in the situation of someone else, or even agree with someone else.  For example, if someone kills someone else to get revenge. Empathy can be used to understand the reason the the person killed someone, even though you've never killed anyone and you don't agree that the person should have killed anyone. You don't feel bad, or have sympathy, for the killer but you understand their motive. However, empathy and sympathy are not mutually exclusive. For example, the family of the victim. You can pity or feel bad for the family, which is sympathy, and also put yourself in their shoes, in order to really understand what they are going through, which is empathy. Here is a photo showing empathy.