The Role of Abuse Risk in the Bidirectional Relationship Between Maternal and Child's Empathy

• In Event: Parenting and Children's Empathy Across Age and Risk Context

Abstract

Background: Children's empathy develops in the context of parental caregiving. Sensitive parenting is related to higher child's empathy, and maltreating parenting is generally related to lower empathy. In our previous paper (Meidan and Uzefovsky, 2020) we show that child's cognitive empathy (CE) is related to maternal CE and personal distress (PD) through abuse risk, while the relationship between maternal and child's emotional empathy (EE) is direct. These findings suggest that child's CE is more susceptible to parenting than EE, and the latter can be thought of as a more temperamental ability. Therefore, the current study examined two main questions; (1) How does change in child's EE and CE relate maternal empathy and vice versa? (2) Does this relationship vary based on the parenting children receive?
Methods: Participants were mothers of children aged 4-10 years; N=462 at Time 1 and N=250 at Time 2, approximately two years later. Participants were recruited through an online platform (Prolific inc.), and reported on their own emotional and cognitive empathy (IRI; Davis, 1983), their child's emotional and cognitive empathy (GEM; Dadds et al., 2003), and views related to abuse risk (BCAP; Ondersma et al., 2005), at both time points. Bivariate change score models (Kievit ey al., 2018) were computed using the package lavaan (in RStudio, v 1.3.959) to examine the relationship between change in maternal and child's empathy. This model treats change as a latent factor explained by the score at Time 1, and allows to assess the bidirectional effects of, in this case, two variables measured at two time points. This analysis was conducted separately for EE and CE, based on the conclusions of the previous study. We also conducted group analysis to compare these effects between mothers who were low and high-risk for abuse at Time 1 (based on a cut-off score of nine on the BCAP).
Results: Change in child's CE is predicted by maternal CE in Time 1 (beta=.239, p=.034). Omitting this pathway resulted in considerable drop in model fit (chi-square= 40.186, p=2.308e-10). Change in child's EE is unrelated to maternal EE at Time 1 (beta=.059, p=.678). Interestingly, change in maternal PD was related to child's CE at Time 1 (beta=-.043, p=.033), and omitting this pathway results in considerable drop in model fit (chi-square=336.16, p=2.2e-16). In the multiple group models, the relationship between maternal CE and child's change in CE was not significant in both groups, but approached significance for those who were below the BCAP cut-off (beta= .251, p=.055). The relationship between child's CE and maternal PD was only significant for mothers above the cut-off (beta=-.071, p=.025).
Conclusions: In the current study we show that CE is more susceptible to maternal effects than EE. We also show that the relationship between some empathy components, namely maternal PD and child's CE, is bidirectional, and depends on the abuse risk of the parent. This highlights the complex circular relationship between maternal empathy, abuse risk, and child's empathy.

Authors

• Adi Meidan, Ben-Gurion University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Florina Uzefovsky, Ben Gurion University in the Negev
  Presenting Author