Article

Abstract In this corpus-based study I contribute to the

description and analysis of linguistic and cultural variation in
the conceptualization of sympathy, compassion, and empathy. On the
basis of a contrastive semantic analysis of sympathy, compassion,
and empathy in English and their Russian translational
equivalents, sočuvstvie, sostradanie, and sopereživanie, I demonstrate
significant differences in the conceptualization of these words,
which I explain by reference to the prevalence of different models
of social interaction in Anglo and Russian cultures, as well as
different cultural attitudes towards emotional expression. As a
methodology I apply the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM),
which is based on empirically established lexical and grammatical
universals, and argue that it is a powerful tool in contrastive
studies.

Key Words culture, emotions, empathy, English, Natural

Semantic Metalanguage, Russian, sympathy

Anna Gladkova
University of New England, Australia

Sympathy, Compassion, and Empathy

in English and Russian: A Linguistic
and Cultural Analysis
Sympathy, compassion, and empathy are concepts which appear regularly
in the literature of numerous areas of the humanities and social
sciences, including psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy, sociology,
ethics, and economics, as well as political, literary, and religious studies
(see e.g., Berlant, 2004; Clark, 1997; Eisenberg, 2000; Fontaine, 2001).
These terms refer to emotions that people experience in response to
other people’s plights and, therefore, reflect salient characteristics of
humans as social beings.
Regrettably, previous research on sympathy, compassion, and empathy
has attempted to analyze such emotions through the prism of the
English terms alone, and has largely ignored the fact that other
languages and cultures present different ways of conceptualizing these
or similar states. By treating these states as culture-independent
psychological universals, scholars bring an Anglo cultural bias into
the analysis. For example, the title of Carr, Iacoboni, Dubeau, Mazziota,
Copyright © The Author(s), 2010. Reprints and permissions:
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http://cap.sagepub.com/ Vol. 16(2): 267–285 [DOI: 10.1177/1354067X10361396]
Culture & Psychology 16(2)

and Lenzi’s (2003) article ‘Neural mechanisms of empathy in humans’

implies that empathy corresponds to some kind of reality which is inde-
pendent of the English language. Similarly, Khen Lampert, in his book
Traditions of Compassion, treats compassion as ‘a universal phenomenon’
(2005, p. vii), without questioning its linguistic and cultural specificity.
Such examples in relation to the concepts sympathy, compassion’, and
empathy can be multiplied (e.g., Eisenberg, 2000; Nussbaum, 2001;
Wispé, 1991).1
However, numerous studies in linguistics, anthropology, and cultural
psychology suggest that there exists considerable linguistic and cultural
variation in the conceptualization of mental states in general, and
emotions in particular (e.g., Goddard, 2007; Lillard, 1998; Russell, 1991;
Shweder, 2003; Wierzbicka, 1999). Recent developments in linguistic
semantics offer tools which can help to overcome the conceptual
confusion and methodological difficulties that hinder disciplines
studying mental states. In this paper I demonstrate how the method-
ology of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage can effectively be used to
analyze semantic and cultural differences between the English terms
sympathy, compassion, and empathy and their Russian translational equiv-
alents sočuvstvie, sostradanie, and sopereživanie (OERD, 1984).2
This paper consists of four sections. In the first section I justify the
importance of linguistic data in the study of cross-cultural conceptual-
ization of emotions, and I describe my methodology. In the second
section I conduct a semantic analysis of the words under consideration.
In the third section I compare the English and Russian words that are
regarded as translational counterparts and provide a cultural interpret-
ation of the differences between them. Implications are discussed in the
fourth section.

Data and Methodology

Linguistic Data as Evidence in Emotion Research
In this work I study a contemporary conceptualization of the English
and Russian terms. To acquire a representative account of the use of
these terms in both languages I refer to the data available in two online
corpora—The Russian National Corpus (for Russian) and the Cobuild
Bank of English (for English). Both these corpora are useful sources for
the purposes of my analysis in that they represent a wide range
of contemporary language use: written texts (including literary,
academic, journalistic, and educational works, and websites) and
transcripts of spoken language (television and radio broadcasts,
interviews, and conversations). Since these two corpora differ in

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 Gladkova A Linguistic and Cultural Analysis of Sympathy

volume and timeframe representation I balance the linguistic data by

limiting my search of the Russian Corpus to around 73 million words
dating between 1990 and 2008, and to the whole Cobuild Corpus,
which comprises 56 million words and includes texts dating from 1991
to the present (as of 2008).
It has been argued that studies of emotions based on verbal descrip-
tions are limited in that they cannot provide a full picture of emotions
and they do not reflect how emotions are actually expressed. In
particular, Matsumoto (2006, pp. 48–49) notes that such ‘data cannot
be used to make inferences about differences (or similarities for that
matter) in actual expression or judgment of expressions across cultures’
and that emotions should be accessed by a methodology that is not
based on verbal descriptions.
I agree with Matsumoto that studies based on verbal descriptions of
emotions cannot substitute studies based on the observation of spon-
taneously aroused emotions. However, it does not follow that linguis-
tic studies should be abandoned. Any study of emotions is inevitably
recorded and reported using natural language, which brings a linguis-
tic and cultural bias into the analysis, and therefore distorts the results.
Moreover, the practice of so-called ‘back translation’ has a disadvantage
in the way that it ignores differences in the conceptualization of
emotions (cf. Goddard, 2007). A solution to this problem can be found
in the methodology that illuminates language- and culture-specific
terminology through the use of universal concepts, such as are avail-
able in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) inventory.

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage as a Method of

Semantic Analysis
NSM is a methodology of linguistic and conceptual analysis which was
developed by Anna Wierzbicka, Cliff Goddard, and their colleagues. It
consists of 63 empirically established lexical and grammatical uni-
versals. These universals form a minilanguage, which is used to repre-
sent meaning of linguistic units.3
Within the NSM approach emotion terms are explained by reference
to a prototypical cognitive scenario, which gives rise to a certain way
of feeling. This approach is consistent with the view held in cultural
psychology that emotion concepts can be decomposed into ‘script-like
or narrative’ slots (Shweder, Haidt, Horton, & Joseph, 2008, p. 414)
(cf. also ‘scripts’, Mennon, 2000; Russell, 1991, or ‘scenarios’,
D’Andrade, 1990). This decomposition allows researchers to dis-
tinguish one emotion term from another, to specify their meanings, and
to demonstrate their cultural specificity.

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The aim of an NSM-based conceptual analysis of an emotion term is

to create a semantic explication of the term which represents a proto-
typical way of thinking and feeling associated with this emotion. This
explication is expected to be broad enough to account for a variety of
uses of the term within its single meaning. The validity of an expli-
cation can be tested by its substitution into the term’s contexts of use.
The advantage of using NSM in conceptual analysis lies in the fact
that it makes it possible to capture the meaning of an emotion term of
any language by using words that are available in that language (as the
universals are found in every language). It therefore represents an
‘insider’s’ perspective on an emotion (cf. Geertz, 1976). At the same
time, the proposed explications can also be represented in any language
due to the universality of the metalanguage. This cannot be achieved if
we rely on words of either ordinary or scientific language, because these
inevitably introduce with them the linguistic and cultural bias of that
language (Goddard, 2002). For example, by limiting the description of
a Russian term to English, researchers introduce an English/Anglo
linguistic and cultural bias into their analysis. In this paper, however,
NSM explications are accompanied by a commentary in non-NSM
English in order to justify the proposed explications and to make them
clearer and easier to read for non-NSM specialists.
NSM explications are proposed on the basis of the analysis of
numerous examples of use of a term by ordinary speakers. Thus, the
explications aim to reflect a ‘folk’ (D’Andrade, 1987) model of
emotions, which may differ from their scientific interpretation.
The semantic explications of emotion terms proposed in this study
can have manifold uses. First, they embody formulae which en-
compass cultural worldviews of a particular emotion. Second, they
can serve as foundations for further experimental studies in cross-
cultural psychology, for example, in the search for cultural variation
in physiological aspects and display rules of emotions. Third, the
results obtained in this study can be applied to studies of bilingualism
to construct models of bilingual lexica (Wierzbicka, 2005, cf. also
Altarriba, 2003; Pavlenko, 2005).

Semantic analysis
English Sympathy, Compassion, Empathy
Sympathy
The term sympathy is polysemous. In this article I describe one meaning
of sympathy as it is used in the combinations ‘to feel sympathy for/with
someone else’ and ‘to have sympathy for/with someone else’.

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 Gladkova A Linguistic and Cultural Analysis of Sympathy

Sympathy is an emotion which is caused by the realization that some-

thing bad has happened to another person. The range of conditions
that can trigger sympathy is relatively broad and extends from the
discomforts of everyday life (for example, working long hours) to
serious misfortunes (such as the death of a loved one, or living through
a war).
Cobuild data suggest that in contemporary English the object of
sympathy can be someone whom one knows and is in contact with, or
someone whom one does not know and is not in contact with. The
following contexts illustrate that sympathy can be felt towards people
one does not know personally (1–2), fictional characters (3), and
people one knows well (4)4:
1. It certainly makes me feel a lot of sympathy for people who have
permanent back problems.
2. For me, it was an ordeal which lasted just five months; for the
Afghan women, it is a fact of life, and they will always have my
sympathy.
3. I felt so much sympathy for the man in this story and little for the
women.
4. We have every sympathy with our son, a teacher, who also works
long hours.
Regarding the nature of the feeling, the corpus data do not reveal any
particular bodily sensations associated with sympathy, except for one
example linking sympathy with pangs:
5. I leafed through the pages, feeling unexpected pangs of sympathy
for people I had never known but whose names I recognized.
At the same time, sympathy can be characterized as heartfelt, which indi-
cates that it is associated with sensations in one’s ‘heart’. Interestingly,
though, such examples are found only in contexts where people are
expressing their sympathy over someone’s death:
6. It is terrible that Alison O’Shaughnessy died in such a brutal way
and her family has our heartfelt sympathy.
Thus, in contemporary English the link between sympathy and associ-
ated bodily sensations is not actively expressed, and the use of the
phrase ‘heartfelt sympathy’ is limited to situations of expressing
condolences.
As the corpus data suggest, a person experiencing sympathy can
show one’s feeling to another person through physical contact, as well
as in one’s tone or in the face. Such kind of expression, however, is

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restricted to situations when the experiencer is in contact with

another person.
In summary, sympathy is triggered by the realization of a negative
emotional state of another person. It can cause some emotional
response in a person, yet there is little evidence to suggest that it is
associated with a bodily sensation. Sympathy can be expressed to
another person, but it is restricted to situations when the people are in
contact with each other. Since sympathy can be experienced in situations
when one does not know another person or has no contact with that
person, this feature cannot be regarded as an invariant of the meaning.
I propose the following formula to capture the meaning of sympathy:
[A] sympathy
a. person X thought about person Y like this:
b. something bad happened to this person
c. this person feels something bad because of this
d. it is not good
e. I don’t want people to feel bad things like this
f. when X thought like this X felt something
g. like people feel when they think like this about someone

The structure of the proposed explication reflects the view that the
meaning of an emotion term has a component (components f–g) indi-
cating a feeling which is caused by a particular way of thinking
(components a–e). The element ‘like’ in components (f–g) signals that
the explication refers to a prototype of a feeling. A similar structure of
explications applies to other terms discussed in this paper.
Explication [A] shows that sympathy is caused by thinking that some-
thing bad happened to someone else and this event led to that person’s
negative feelings (components b and c). This situation receives a
negative evaluation (d) because the person does not want people to
experience such bad feelings (e).

Compassion
Compassion, like sympathy, is evoked when something bad happens to
another person and one feels something bad because of this. Compared
to sympathy, however, compassion is caused by more aggravated states.
For example, having to work long hours would trigger someone’s
sympathy, but not compassion.
A significant difference between sympathy and compassion lies in the
fact that compassion implies a more ‘active’ response to the bad state of
another person. This response does not necessarily result in a helping
action, but it implies at least a desire to help. The set expressions
‘compassionate leave’, ‘compassionate conservatism’ and ‘compassion

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fatigue’ highlight the ‘active’ character of compassion. The following

examples show that compassion involves some kind of expression:

7. Every time Barbara Bush holds an AIDS baby or reads to him, she
is demonstrating compassion.
8. ‘The Whole World Wants to Help’, proclaims the Daily Mail. Its front
page lead says that the tide of global compassion is flowing towards
Iran.
9. An example of his compassion for the victims of the ‘death railway’
has been the building of a monument in their memory at the
junction of the River Kwai.

The fact that compassion can elicit thanks also suggests its ‘active’
character:

10. At this time of crisis, I am grateful for your compassion.

The analysed examples suggest that compassion can be experienced

towards a specific person or a group of people, and the experiencer
may or may not know them personally.
The following explication of compassion is adapted from Wierzbicka
(1999, p. 103).
[B] compassion
a. person X thought about person Y like this:
b. something bad happened to this person
c. this person feels something bad because of this
d. I want to do something good for this person because of this
e. when X thought like this X felt something
f. like people feel when they think like this about someone

Empathy
Empathy refers to a conscious attention to the feelings of another
person. As the data suggest, in Anglo folk psychology (as reflected in
ordinary English) empathy is most commonly conceptualized as a state
rather than a feeling. In Cobuild, the occurrence of the expression to
have empathy is 10 times higher than that of to feel empathy (0.4 vs. 0.04
occurrences per 1 million words, respectively). In accordance with this
finding, I will explicate the expression ‘to have empathy’ in this paper.
The essence of empathy is knowing and understanding the emotional
state of another person. Importantly, that other person does not have
to have experienced something bad. Examples 11 and 12 refer to the
empathy of an adult towards children in situations when nothing indi-
cates that the children feel something bad.

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11. . . .having an abortion had reinforced her empathy for her live son,
whom she was now feeding.
12. She had a great empathy with children and knew how to keep
them alert while they sat.
Example 13 is about the empathy of a writer towards her young
audience, whose feelings and concerns are different from those of
adults but are not necessarily bad.
13. She has a fresh, original voice and, perhaps importantly, an
obvious empathy with her adolescent audience.
Moreover, empathy is also used to refer to an attitude one can have
towards one’s enemies, that is, people who are different from the
experiencer:
14. Speaking from his hospital bed, Dubanenko showed obvious
empathy with his captors. ‘I thought that the Chechens were sort
of bandits. But now I see that all they want is to live separately.
Why shouldn’t they?’
Empathy can be explicated as follows:
[C] empathy
a. person X thinks about someone else like this:
b. something is happening to this person
c. this person feels something because of this
d. I know what a person can feel when something like this happens
e. because of this, I know what this person can be feeling

Russian Sočuvstvie, Sostradanie, and Sopereživanie

An interesting point to note at the start is the similarity of the morpho-
logical structure of sočuvstvie, sostradanie, and sopereživanie. These
words all contain the prefix so- (comparable to the English prefix co-),
which roughly means ‘a joint activity’. In Russian the prefix so- is
regarded as ‘alive’ (Vinogradov, 1960), that is, its meaning is distinct
within the meaning of a word as a whole. For Russian speakers the
emotion terms in question have a transparent morphological structure
and refer to a ‘joint’ or ‘shared’ emotional experience: sočuvstvie—
roughly ‘co-feeling’, sostradanie—roughly ‘co-suffering’, and
sopereživanie—roughly, ‘co-living through’ or ‘co-intense feeling’.

Sočuvstvie
Sočuvstvie is a feeling which is caused by realizing someone else’s bad
situation and his or her consequent negative emotional state. The range
of potential situations evoking sočuvstvie is relatively broad; examples

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from the Corpus include someone being cheated by a salesperson in a

grocery store, having to go far away from home, being criticized in a
newspaper, being lonely, being unemployed, and being old.
Typically, sočuvstvie is experienced towards someone a person knows
and is in contact with. An important constituent of sočuvstvie is that the
experiencer feels some kind of a ‘bond’ between him- or herself and
the target person. An illustration for this quality of sočuvstvie is found
in its tendency to collocate with the name of a social category, bližnij
(literally ‘the one next to you’), hence the collocation sočuvstvie k
bližnemu (literally, ‘sympathy for the one next to you’). Bližnij is a
Russian culture- and language-specific social category which refers to
people with whom one shares one’s life on an everyday basis, and with
whom one feels a bond. It comprises one’s immediate circle of inter-
action, such as family, friends, colleagues, and neighbours, as well as
people one does not know personally but happens to be ‘next to’, as in
situations of commuting or queuing. In example 15, sočuvstvie k
bližnemu is named among basic Russian values:
15. Social’naja reklama dolžna vozroždat’ pervorodnye cennosti:
dobrotu, vzaimoponimanie, sočuvstvie k bližnemu.
[Social advertisement should revive the basic values of kindness,
mutual understanding, and sympathy for the person next to you.]
Moreover, sočuvstvie is not generally expected from postoronnij (roughly,
‘alien’), that is, a person with whom one does not share a bond:
16. No stoit li iskat’ sočuvstvija u postoronnix?
[Is it worth seeking sympathy from strangers?]
Feeling a ‘bond’ with another person implies having good feelings
towards that person. To capture this idea in the explication of
sočuvstvie, I propose the component ‘X (the experiencer) feels some-
thing good towards Y (the object)’. This aspect of sočuvstvie’s meaning
helps to explain other features of the word, such as its strong emotional
character and the ‘outward’ expression of the emotion.
Regarding the nature of the feeling, the Corpus data provide ample
linguistic evidence suggesting that sočuvstvie is associated with deep
and painful sensations in one’s serdce ‘heart’:
17. U Nasti ponevole sžimalos’ serdce ot sočuvstvija.
[Nastja’s heart was painfully contracting against her will from
sympathy.]
18. Serdce moe nadryvalos’ sočuvstviem.
[My heart was painfully tearing itself with sympathy.]

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Another aspect of the feeling of sočuvstvie is the desire to help

another person. Examples from the Corpus include situations when a
person takes a sick person to hospital, pays a visit to someone who has
lost a relative, or when a boss allows an old person to keep working in
the company despite his or her age. There are also examples that show
that sočuvstvie does not necessarily imply performing a helpful action.
Therefore, it can only be generalized that sočuvstvie involves a positive
attitude to the one in trouble.
Sočuvstvie is a feeling which is usually actively shown to the other
person. It can be described as serdečnoe (heartfelt/very cordial),
družeskoe (warm/friendly), gorjačee (hot), živoe (keen/genuine),
nevol’noe (involuntary), neskryvaemoe (unconcealed), or dejstvennoe
(active). The ability of sočuvstvie to collocate with these words suggests
its expressive character. Furthermore, sočuvstvie can have a positive
and healing effect on the one who is in trouble:
19. Ix sočuvstvie očen’ otogrelo mne serdce.
[Their sympathy indeed warmed my heart.]
20. U Miti ot vseobščego k nemu sočuvstvija, vidimo, s duši spalo.
[Mitja felt relieved due to everyone’s sympathy towards him.]
Further evidence that sočuvstvie is conceptualized as a feeling which is
expressed towards another person and can have a positive effect on
him or her is found in the examples where people thank others for their
sočuvstvie:
21. Ja vyrazil emu svoe sočuvstvie, on tixo poblagodaril.
[I expressed my sympathy to him, he thanked me softly.]
We do not find similar examples in the English corpus, where sympathy
elicits thanks. This indicates that the English word sympathy does not
entail ‘outward expression of the feeling’, and thus it differs from the
Russian sočuvstvie.
The meaning of the word sočuvstvie can be represented as follows:
[D] sočuvstvie
a. person X knows that something bad happened to person Y
b. X knows that Y feels something bad because of this
c. when X thinks about it, X feels something bad
d. at the same time X thinks about Y like this:
e. I don’t want this person to feel bad things like this
f. because of this, I want to do something good for this person
g. when X thinks like this about Y, X feels something good towards Y
h. X wants Y to know this
Components a and b in the explication show that sočuvstvie develops
from the awareness of the bad condition and emotional state of another

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person. The choice of the prime KNOW rather than THINK (as used
for English sympathy) is due to the greater degree of ‘closeness’
between the experiencer and the object: the experiencer KNOWS
through his or her contact with the person that something bad has
happened to him or her. Component c captures the ‘painful’ sensations
associated with sočuvstvie. Component d indicates that a parallel
mental activity develops in the experiencer’s mind—the experiencer
wants to stop the person from experiencing the negative emotional
state (component e) by doing something good for that person
(component f). This way of thinking is associated with a positive
attitude towards the other person (component g). The desire to express
this attitude to the one in trouble is captured in component h.

Sostradanie
Sostradanie derives from the word stradanie, which means ‘suffering’.
As can be expected, this emotion develops in response to more serious
negative situations than those which elicit sočuvstvie.
Apart from this, sostradanie is similar to sočuvstvie in that it involves
sharing the emotional state of another person, a desire to relieve his or
her plight and to do something good for him or her and a generally
positive attitude towards that person. However, the emotional experi-
ence associated with sostradanie is more intense than that associated
with sočuvstvie, reflecting the more intense emotional state of the other
person:
22. U menja zaxodilos’ serdce ot sostradanija.
[My heart was pounding unbearably from compassion.]
23. U menja v serdce stol’ko sostradanija, čto ono gotovo razorvat’sja
každuju minutu.
[My heart is so full of compassion that it could burst any minute.]
Another difference between sočuvstvie and sostradanie is that
sostradanie is not directly expressed to the suffering person. The Corpus
data contains no examples where the feeling is expressed to the person.
I agree with Levontina’s (2004) cultural analysis that in a situation
when someone else is suffering it might be tactless to attract attention
to one’s sostradanie.
The final explication of sostradanie is as follows:
[E] sostradanie
a. person X knows that something very bad happened to person Y
b. X knows that Y feels something very bad because of this
c. when X thinks about it, X feels something very bad
d. at the same time X thinks about Y like this:

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e. I don’t want this person to feel very bad things like this
f. because of this, I want to do something good for this person
g. when X thinks like this about Y, X feels something good towards Y
This explication of sostradanie differs from that of sočuvstvie in two
ways. First, the stronger character of the experience of the other person
and the feeling associated with it are marked by the element very
(components a, b, and e). Secondly, component h in sočuvstvie is not
included in the explication of sostradanie.

Sopereživanie
Derivationally, the word sopereživanie (traditionally translated by
English empathy) is related to pereživanie, which roughly means ‘intense
feeling’ (cf. Gladkova, 2005). Therefore, sopereživanie describes an
‘intense feeling’ which is caused by the ‘intense feeling’ of another
person. Typical situations when sopereživanie can be experienced are
watching a movie or a play, reading a book, or following a sports
competition. In such cases a person becomes aware of the emotional
state of other people and in the process experiences a similar emotional
state.
In order to feel sopereživanie, it is essential for the experiencer to sense
some bond between oneself and another person. In the case of fans and
sports teams, this bond usually develops due to a common town or
country of origin. In the case of fictional characters, this bond can be
formed by belonging to the same gender or age group, or having had
similar experiences. Sopereživanie can also be felt by someone who is
away from home and becomes aware of some misfortune happening
to the people in their native country (e.g., a terrorist attack, flood, earth-
quake, etc.):
24. My skorbeli i molilis’ vmeste so vsej stranoj, sopereživaja i
sočuvstvuja postradavšim i ix rodstvennikam.
[We grieved and prayed together with the whole country, deeply
empathized and sympathized with the victims and their relatives.]
Like sočuvstvie and sostradanie, sopereživanie implies sharing the
negative state of another person, and on its own implies a very strong
feeling:
25. Ja ostro soperežival prezidentu.
[I acutely sympathized with the president.]
26. Ja uslyšal, kak dvaždy stisnulos’ serdce, soperežival, sočuvstvoval,
somnenij net!
[I heard how my heart painfully contracted twice, I empathized,
sympathized, no doubt!]

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In summary, sopereživanie is an emotion which is caused by the real-

ization of the intense, negative emotional state of another person with
whom the experiencer feels a bond and so experiences a similar kind
of emotional state and develops a positive attitude towards that
person. The explication of sopereživanie is as follows:
[F] sopereživanie
a. person X knows that something bad is happening to person Y
b. X knows that Y feels something bad because of this
c. when X thinks about it, X feels something bad,
d. at the same time X thinks about Y like this:
e. this person is someone like me
f. I don’t want bad things like this to happen to this person
g. I want good things to happen to this person
h. when X thinks like this about Y, X feels something good towards Y

Results and Discussion

Comparison of the Translational Equivalents
In this section I compare the meanings of the translational equivalents
that have been analysed in this paper.
The meaning of sympathy differs from the meaning of sočuvstvie in
three respects. First, direct contact with and personal knowledge of the
person are inherent to feelings of sočuvstvie, but not to sympathy.
Second, sočuvstvie involves two interrelated feelings: the shared
negative experience of the other person and a positive feeling towards
that person. By comparison, no linguistic evidence was found implying
a particular positive attitude in sympathy. Third, ways of demonstrat-
ing the emotion are more diverse and visible in sočuvstvie than in
sympathy. Sočuvstvie is also characterized by a desire to ease the plight
of another person, which is not a part of the meaning of sympathy.
English compassion and Russian sostradanie differ in the severity of
the person’s condition and in the complexity and the expression of the
feeling. Sostradanie is an emotional reaction which occurs only in
response to very severe conditions experienced by another person,
whereas compassion is appropriate in less serious states. Therefore, the
range of situations that cause sostradanie is narrower than the range
that causes compassion. In this respect, compassion is closer in meaning
to sympathy and sočuvstvie than to sostradanie. Sostradanie is a more
complex feeling than compassion. Like sočuvstvie, it involves sharing the
emotional experience of another person and developing a positive
feeling towards that person. Compassion, like sympathy, does not entail
this positive feeling, but unlike sostradanie, it results in a more helpful
attitude towards the object. At the same time, compassion is closer to

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sočuvstvie in the array of situations that can cause this feeling and in
the emotional expression of it. Therefore, in some contexts compassion
is best translated into Russian as sočuvstvie rather than sostradanie.
However, sočuvstvie and compassion are also not fully identical in
meaning.
Empathy and sopereživanie differ significantly in the content of the
cognitive scenarios involved and, therefore, represent two distinct
attitudes. Empathy is a person’s controlled conscious reaction to the
emotional experience of another person. It does not necessarily involve
an emotional attitude; therefore, the ‘feel’ component is absent from its
explication. Sopereživanie involves sharing the negative emotional
experience of another person and developing a positive attitude
towards that person. In spite of these differences, there is no other
word in Russian which is as close in meaning to empathy as
sopereživanie. Thus, Russian speakers have filled this gap with the word
ėmpatija, borrowed from the English empathy.

The Emotion Terms in their Broader Cultural Contexts

The observed differences and similarities allow me to put forward a
hypothesis about the relationship between the meanings of the words
under consideration and the cultural factors that underlie them.
There is a clear difference between the Russian and English words
in terms of the degree of familiarity between the experiencer of the
emotion and the object. In the Russian words, there is a preference for
these feelings to be experienced towards people whom one knows
personally or comes into contact with. This is not the case with the
English words, which denote feelings which can be elicited by any
person. These differences in meanings can be attributed to the preva-
lence of different models of social interaction in these two cultures.
Russian models of social interaction rely on the distinction between
people one knows well and people one does not know. Thus, in the
Russian lexicon the social categories of svoi/naši (literally ‘own/ours’),
rodnye ‘kin’, and blizkie ‘one’s people’ (that is, people one knows well
and regards as ‘someone like me’) are opposed to the social categories
of čužie ‘alien people’ and postoronnie ‘strangers’ (that is, people one
does not know and does not regard as ‘someone like me’). Conse-
quently, relations with ‘close’ people are characterized by warmth,
openness and an overt display of emotions, while ‘distant’ people are
treated in a more reserved manner (Boym, 1994; Pesmen, 2000;
Richmond, 2003).
Models of social interaction in Anglo culture do not rely to the same
degree on the contrast between ‘close’ people and people one does not

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know. This is evidenced by the lack of encoding of such polarized

categories in the English language. While English does use social
categories like family, friends, and mates to reflect one’s ‘close’ people,
they are not regarded as opposite to the social categories of ‘strangers’
or ‘alien people’.
Other differences between the meanings of the Russian and English
words are associated with the ways the emotions in question are
expressed. Among the Russian words, expression was shown to be
most significant for sočuvstvie. It is less marked in the cases of
sostradanie and sopereživanie, because the former is restricted by ethical
norms, and for the latter there is no direct communication between the
experiencer and the object. Emotional expression is seen to be less
significant in the English words. This fact again appears to be related
to the prevalence of different models of social interaction in the two
cultures. These findings are consistent with Marian and Kaushanskaya
(2004), Pavlenko (2002), and Wierzbicka (2009), who report on a
higher degree of emotional expression in Russian culture than in Anglo
culture.
In psychological and sociological literature differences in ‘modes’ of
interaction similar to those observed in this paper are often explained
by labelling Russian culture as ‘collectivist’ or ‘interdependent’ and
Anglo culture ‘individualist’ or ‘independent’ (cf. Hofstede, 2001;
Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Mesquita, 2001; Triandis, 2001). However,
the categories ‘collectivist’ and ‘individualist’ are too imprecise to
account for the differences in the emotions described in this paper.
These terms are based on the researchers’ own perspectives and do not
reflect those of the insiders. As I have shown, it is more relevant to
discuss the content of Russian emotion terms by reference to the
Russian social categories of svoi/naši, blizkie/čužie.

Concluding Remarks
This study contributes to the analysis of linguistic and cultural vari-
ation in the conceptualization of sympathy, compassion, and empathy-
type emotions, an area which has been largely overlooked in the
psychological literature. The use of universal semantic concepts
allowed me to identify the precise semantic and conceptual differences
between the English words sympathy, compassion, and empathy and the
Russian words sočuvstvie, sostradanie, and sopereživanie, which are
regarded as their translational counterparts. These differences are
mainly related to the degree of familiarity between the experiencer and
the target person and the complexity and expression of the feelings.

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These differences can be attributed to the different models of social

interaction prevalent in Anglo and Russian cultures and different atti-
tudes towards the expression of emotions.

Notes
1. An attempt to address cultural variations in the conceptualization of
compassion is presented in Davidson and Harrington (2002). While the book
is commendable in its attempt to represent differing perspectives, it does
not demonstrate exactly how Western science can use its strengths to
understand a culturally different way of thinking and feeling.
2. Strictly speaking, the English word empathy has its closest equivalent in the
Russian word ‘ėmpatija’, which is a recent borrowing from English.
However, in Russian psychology literature the new term ‘empatija’ is
commonly explained via sopereživanie—a traditional Russian emotion term
and a translation counterpart of empathy (e.g., Stepanov, 2002; Vasiljuk,
2007). Among previous linguistic studies of these Russian terms, Apresjan
(1997), Levontina (2004), and Zalizniak (2005) are the most noteworthy. My
study differs from them by providing explications in verifiably universal
concepts, and by providing cultural interpretations of the semantic
differences between the Russian and English words. Travis (1998) applied
NSM methodology in the analysis of empathy, but the scope of my study is
wider and the proposed explication is slightly different.
3. NSM theoretical assumptions are discussed in Goddard & Wierzbicka
(2002). Further references, including publications on cross-cultural
variation of emotions and a list of universals, are available from
http://www.une.edu.au/bcss/linguistics/nsm/
4. Additional examples are available from the author upon request.

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Biography
ANNA GLADKOVA is a linguist. She received a PhD in Linguistics (2008)
from the Australian National University. She is currently a Lecturer in
Linguistics at the School of Behavioral, Cognitive, and Social Sciences,
University of New England, Australia. Her research interests are in language
and culture interface, semantics, pragmatics, and cross-cultural
communication. ADDRESS: School of Behavioral, Cognitive, and Social
Sciences, University of New England, Armidale 2351 NSW, Australia.
[email: Anna.Gladkova@une.edu.au, angladkova@gmail.com]

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