Fear suppresses sympathy because the two emotions drive opposite behavioral tendencies

Evidence

When people feel sympathy for another person, they experience an overwhelming desire to help alleviate that person’s suffering (Eisenberg, 2000; Wispé, 1986, 1991). This approach-oriented emotion should be mitigated by fear because this emotion promotes opposite, withdraworiented activity (Izard & Ackerman, 2000; Ohman, 2009). The results of a meta-analysis of over 500 studies (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2008) support this contention by showing a moderate negative association between intergroup anxiety and empathy, which is a closely related emotion to sympathy (Eisenberg, 2000). — Sherman A. Lee, Chelsea A. Reid, Stephen D. Short, Jeffrey A. Gibbons, Ruth Yeh, and Matthew L. Campbell, Fear of Muslims, 116

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A compact mechanistic account of why fear and sympathy cannot easily coexist: one is approach-oriented, the other withdrawal-oriented, with meta-analytic support across 500+ studies.
• XREF: connects to: Perspective taking can weaken fear-based realistic threat via induced empathy. — Blake M. Riek, Eric W. Mania, and Samuel L. Gaertner, Intergroup Threat and Outgroup…, 166