Poster #124 - Early Adolescent Cognitive and Affective Empathy: Direct and Interactive Ties to Social-Emotional Adjustment

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

Empathy is composed of two distinct but interacting components: affective empathy and cognitive empathy (Cox et al., 2012; Perry & Shamay-Tsoory, 2013). Cognitive empathy (CE) reflects role-taking abilities and adopting another’s view to generate emotional appraisal, whereas affective empathy (AE) refers to the empathic concern and emotional contagion reactions felt by observing the experiences of others (Decety & Cowell, 2014; de Waal, 2008). Empathy in general seems to be related to positive adjustments and behaviors. However, these relationships are not well understood with regards to social-emotional adjustment during early adolescence, when peer relationships become increasingly important. In the present study, we examined how adolescents’ CE and AE are related to social-emotional adjustment. Specifically, we examined direct and interactive associations between CE, AE and negative affect, social self-efficacy, shyness, friendship quality, and peer victimization. We also examined whether these associations differ depending on whether self-esteem (relevant to empathy and the adjustment indices) was controlled for. These constructs were selected based on existing findings and in order to capture adjustment within the contexts of personal well-being (negative affect), and close (friendship quality), more broad (social self-efficacy), and less normative negative (victimization) peer-relational experiences.
We administered surveys to a diverse sample of early adolescents from a middle school in the southeastern United States (N=321). All measures were reliable. Multiple regression analyses with each form of empathy as predictors revealed that CE was positively related to friendship quality and social self-efficacy, and negatively to shyness, negative affect, and victimization (see Table 1). AE was positively related to friendship quality, shyness, negative affect, and victimization, and negatively to social self-efficacy (see Table 1). Additional regression models with self-esteem added as a predictor revealed that both CE and AE continued to predict shyness, friendship quality, and social self-efficacy in the same aforementioned directions. Empathy’s prediction of negative affect and victimization were weakened to non-significance when self-esteem was added as a predictor (see Table 2). CE and AE interacted in relation to shyness and friendship quality. AE was positively related to shyness only for people low or average in CE. Friendship quality was related to both forms of empathy, but differed in magnitude between people high/low in one form or the other; follow-up analyses for this finding were not immediately intuitive.
Preliminary results suggest that while empathy overall can promote positive social-emotional outcomes, an adolescent’s lack in one form or the other is related to specific forms of negative adjustment. Further, AE in particular can be tied to negative adjustment, driven to some degree by low self-esteem, but may also bolster friendship quality. Given that adolescence seems to be a sensitive period for the development of CE (Lissa et al., 2016) and that empathy has been tied to bullying and victimization (Brewer & Kerslake, 2015; Kokkinos & Kipritsi, 2012), the present study provides an important step towards developing empathic interventions that are sensitive to how separate forms can affect outcomes for adolescents.

Authors

• Cody Dillon-Owens, Roanoke College
  Presenting Author

• Danielle Findley-Van Nostrand, Roanoke College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Chris Buchholz, Roanoke College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tiina Ojanen, University of South Florida
  Non-Presenting Author