What exactly is empathy?

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...and how can you have a lack of it? I thought that empathy was just a feeling of sympathy for someone only if you have been through the same experience as them.
For example, I think I feel empathy for people on TV who talk about depression since I have depression myself and I notice other people who aren't depressed don't really seem to care about what they are feeling. If someone breaks their bone and says it hurts, I will feel empathetic towards them (since I have experienced pain) but only sympathy for the unique type of pain a broken bone causes since I have never broken a bone myself.
It is right to say that if you lack empathy it is because you simply have not been through the same experience as them? or is it that for some reason you have been through the same experience yet you still fail to connect?

It has lots of different definitions. Generally though, someone trying to get you to believe you lack empathy has personal reasons for doing that.

I'm unsure about empathy aswell, but I do know what you're talking about. Like when another female gets menstrual pains, I can give them my full empathy because they're the worst pains I've had in my life so far, and I even get them when someone else gets them, because I know how they feel so much. But when I get them, my dad (or any other male) says, ''they can't be that bad!'' but I know that men would say that because they've never had them before.

I think I read somwehre, though, that men lack more empathy than women, unless the same situation has happened to them, whereas women can build up empathy more better even if the situation has never happened to her. That's what I have experienced anyway with men and women.

I do get muddled up between empathy and sympathy.

There are 2 kinds of empathy.

Cognitive Empathy is the ability to discern other's emotions from their appearance and behavior. This is what Aspies are typically bad at.

Afective Empathy is the ability to share emotions, to have someone else's situation trigger an emotional response in you. This is what i have always though of as "sympathy," and is something that Aspies tend to do just fine.

From what I've been able to gather from wrongplanet conversations, Aspies not only have difficulty in Cognitive Empathy, but also project body language and facial expressions differently. As though Aspies "speak a different body language" entirely. Which scrambles the Cognitive Empathy of NTs trying to empathically "read" an Aspie.

For example, when I am concentrating, I look "angry" to an NT, even though I am not.

Another way to understand empathy is how it differs from sympathy. Sympathy is when you recognize the emotions of another person and show outward feelings of pity for them, treat them with respect to their feelings but maintain distance and are not affected or touched by their emotions and their state. Sympathy is more of a formal behavior.

Empathy is a step further: you not only recognize the person's emotions but you are affected by them, you feel for them, it's deeper and natural, you're feeling with that person, you can put yourself in their shoes, rather than just being sorry for them, it's not just formal display of pity as in case of sympathy.

Both empathy and sympathy require identification of the other person's feelings. However, you can show formal sympathy when someone tells you that the person is in hardship and you find it appropriate to show them sympathy, even if you may not fully identify with their feelings. Empathy comes from deep within, no one needs to tell you that the other person is suffering, you feel their pain.

I have problems telling, for example, if the person is sad, upset or just tired. I may try to be sympathetic for the wrong reason: "no, I'm fine, I'm just tired". On the other hand I can sometimes feel overwhelming empathy when I see a person, a child in particular, who's suffering, I can almost feel pain inside me and all that while people around don't seem to be affected much.

I don't have either of it except for animals and myself and as far as those cramps go, why not taking a pain killer or get the parts cut out to make it an end?

I still don't really understand what it is and how it can differ from sympathy.
People tell me I look miserable during a conversation when in fact I feel fine so when I see others looking like that I think they are fine (unless they start crying) so they need to tell me if I'm wrong otherwise I will just assume.
If someone was to ask me if I was an empathetic person I wouldn't know the answer. Maybe because I don't instinctively know the answer means I do lack empathy, but I hope I'm wrong.

Take the hint. If you can't make it make sense, maybe it doesn't.

Sympathy is when you feel for someone who has been through the same thing as you.

Empathy is when you feel for someone who has not been through something you have, or someone who doesn't necessarily have a connection with you.

I personally feel I have less empathy than NTs supposedly have (though quite honestly, many NTs seem to have even less of it than me), but I can still sympathise with people if I know how things feel from experience - however, if the person feeling those things is someone I dislike, I am probably more likely to feel schadenfreude rather than sympathy, but then that's quite "normal" anyway

Sympathy is an abstract word that everyone gives a different meaning of. Empathy is more than sympathy.