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Assimilation vs Empathy - What's the difference?

assimilation | empathy |

As nouns the difference between assimilation and empathy

is that assimilation is the act of assimilating or the state of being assimilated while empathy is the intellectual identification of the thoughts, feelings, or state of another person.

assimilation

English

(assimilation)

Noun

(en noun)
  • The act of assimilating]] or the state of being [[assimilate, assimilated.
  • * {{quote-book, year=1797, author=An English Lady, title=A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795,, chapter=, edition= citation
    • , passage=--France swarms with Gracchus's and Publicolas, who by imaginary assimilations of acts, which a change of manners has rendered different, fancy themselves more than equal to their prototypes.}}
  • * {{quote-news, year=1996, date=January 26, author=Bertha Husband, title=Double Identity, work=Chicago Reader citation
    • , passage=His work generally is full of assimilations and quotations from art that is not Mexican, and he's said, "Nationalism has nothing to do with my work.}}
  • The metabolic conversion of nutrients into tissue.
  • * {{quote-book, year=1908, author=Washington Gladden, title=The Church and Modern Life, chapter=, edition= citation
    • , passage=We have great need to be careful in these assimilations ; some kinds of food are rich but not easily digested.}}
  • (by extension) The absorption of new ideas into an existing cognitive structure.
  • (phonology) A sound change process by which the phonetics of a speech segment becomes more like that of another segment in a word (or at a word boundary), so that a change of phoneme occurs.
  • (sociology, cultural studies) The adoption, by a minority group, of the customs and attitudes of the dominant culture.

    • Related terms

    * assimilate

    Anagrams

    *

    empathy

    English

    Noun

    (wikipedia empathy)
  • the intellectual identification of the thoughts, feelings, or state of another person
  • capacity to understand another person's point of view or the result of such understanding
    • She had a lot of empathy for her neighbor; she knew what it was like to lose a parent too.
  • (parapsychology, science fiction) a paranormal ability to psychically read another person's emotions

    • Usage notes

    Used similarly to sympathy, interchangeably in looser usage. In stricter usage, empathy is stronger and more intimate, meaning that the subject understands and shares an emotion with the object – as in “I feel your pain” – while (term) is weaker and more distant – concern, but not shared emotion: “I care for you”.