'sympathetic feeling' is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to express understanding or compassion, usually towards someone who is experiencing difficulty. For example: "He shared with us his story of hardship and we all felt a sympathetic feeling towards him."
Indeed, what neither of the two studies did was to measure whether the empathetic responses led to sympathetic feeling.
Though the tone varies from Miss Edgeworth's often sympathetic feeling for children to Mrs. Sherwood's Savonarolan severities, one idea dominates: a special literature for the child must be manufactured in order to improve or reform him.
Eden and Van Dyke have written slightly contrasting memoirs of the ups and downs of being TV pioneers, but both emphasize their sense of themselves as ordinary people who seized their big breaks through diligence and a totally sympathetic feeling for their roles.
Smith gives two spectacular examples of cases where the spectator has a sympathetic feeling that does not correspond to the agent's.
This account allows for us to judge other people's feelings against the background of our sympathetic feelings for them.
We may cultivate sympathetic feelings from respect for the law, and then find these feelings prompting us to act in certain ways.
Imagination is essential to the production even of the "idea" of another's feelings, and sympathetic feelings are no longer ones that the other person need actually have.
Sympathy assists beneficence, as the maxim of sympathy is one both of sharing actively in others feelings and of cultivating one's naturally sympathetic feelings to assist oneself in understanding their feelings and needs (MM 6 456 57; M 29 626).
He argues that empathy, particularly the vicarious sharing of the sympathetic feelings of an observed agent toward the target of his or her actions, should be conceived of as the foundational principle of moral judgments.
In contrast, Carruthers (1989) asserts that his own arguments that nonhuman animals (even dogs) lack consciousness are sufficiently weighty that we are morally obligated to eradicate or ignore our sympathetic feelings toward such creatures.
This term refers to the sympathetic feelings a hostage may develop for a captor and his views.
