Reciprocal Relationship of Empathy and Depression in Early Adolescence

• In Event: Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Empathy has been associated with positive social and behavioral outcomes, but sharing the feelings of others has also been linked to increased risk for internalizing problems (Tone & Tully, 2014). Specifically, sharing other people’s suffering puts empathic adolescents at increased risk of developing depressive symptoms (Gambin & Sharp, 2018). Aside from this study, little is known about longitudinal effects of empathy on depressive symptoms in early adolescence. Moreover, little is known on whether experiencing internalizing problems may promote empathy by increasing people’s sensitivity to the feelings of others. This study aims to better understand these links by examining reciprocal relationships of empathy and depressive symptoms in ethnically diverse early adolescents.

The sample includes 704 adolescents (48% female, 22% Caucasian, 78% African American) who took part in Waves 1 and 2 of the Birmingham Youth Violence Study (Mage=11.76 and 13.16 years). Empathy was measured at both waves using a nine-item empathy subscale of the social-skills rating system (Gresham & Elliott, 1990). At Wave 2, adolescents self-reported their depressive symptoms using six items from the DISC Predictive Scales (Lucas et al., 2001). At Wave 1, hopelessness was assessed as a proxy using four items of the Hopelessness scale for children (Kazdin, Rodgers, & Colbus, 1986). An autoregressive cross-lagged path model was tested in Mplus to investigate reciprocal relationships between empathy and depressive symptoms or hopelessness across the two time points using age, gender, and ethnicity as covariates. Multigroup modeling evaluated gender differences.

Bivariate correlations indicate a negative relationship between hopelessness and empathy at Wave 1 (r=-.10, p=.009), and no relationship between empathy and depression at Wave 2 (r=-.07, p=.105). The model was just-identified and thus had a perfect fit. Empathy and hopelessness were negatively associated at Wave 1 (β=-.10, p=.007), whereas empathy and depression showed no residual correlation at Wave 2 (β=-.03, p=.496). Empathy was moderately stable over time (β = .46, p<.001) and hopelessness weakly predicted depressive symptoms over the two waves (β=.13, p=.002). Empathy at Wave 1 did not predict depressive symptoms (β=-.07, p=.104), nor did hopelessness predict empathy over time (β=.01, p=.802). Females reported higher empathy at both Wave 1 (β=.13, p<.001) and Wave 2 (β=.07, p=.008). Males reported more hopelessness at Wave 1 (β=-.20, p<.001), but females reported more depressive symptoms at Wave 2 (β=.12, p=.003). The model did not differ by gender (Delta chi-square(2)=.866, p=.649).

Results suggest that contrary to the hypotheses, empathy was negatively associated with hopelessness cross-sectionally, but did not predict depression over time. Likewise, hopelessness did not predict adolescent empathy. The negative relationship between hopelessness and empathy suggests that youth who feel hopeless may be too overwhelmed with their own distress to empathize with others. Consistent with prior research, females reported higher levels of empathy than males (Toussaint & Webb, 2005), and males reported more hopelessness in preadolescence, while females were more prone to develop depressive symptoms in early adolescence (Dekker et al., 2007). More research is needed to better understand links between empathy and depressive symptoms in adolescence.

Authors

• Alexandria Katherine Evans, University of Alabama, Birmingham
  Presenting Author

• Marlon Goering, University of Alabama at Birmingham
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sylvie Mrug, University of Alabama at Birmingham
  Non-Presenting Author