What term describes the feeling of compassion for or understanding the difficulties of another person?

The term that describes the feeling of compassion for or understanding the difficulties of another person is empathy. Empathy involves the ability to recognize, understand, and share the feelings of someone else. It allows a person to connect with another's emotional experience, fostering genuine concern and awareness regarding their struggles or hardships.

Sympathy, on the other hand, refers to feeling pity or sorrow for someone else's misfortune without necessarily sharing their emotional experience. While both empathy and sympathy involve an emotional response to another person's difficulties, empathy goes deeper by facilitating a more profound connection that typically leads to greater understanding and support.

Compassion is an action-oriented response often stemming from empathy, where one not only understands the suffering of another but is also motivated to help relieve that suffering. Kindness involves being friendly and considerate but does not inherently require a deep emotional understanding of another's struggles.

Consequently, empathy is recognized as the most precise term for the ability to comprehend and resonate with the hardships faced by others.