Empathy in adolescence

Abstract

Empathy is the ability to understand and to share another’s emotional state, and is seen as an important social skill to maintain relationships, to and to inhibit aggression. Yet, there has been little longitudinal research investigating the development of empathy, especially when it comes to adolescence, which is a formative period for empathy. Moreover, although empathy is generally seen as a multi-dimensional construct, involving affective, cognitive and motor processes, and encompassing trait empathy (i.e., the general tendency to empathize with others) and state empathy (i.e., empathy as it occurs in specific situations), previous research has mainly focused on self-reported trait empathy. Therefore little is known about how these different processes are interrelated. The aim of this dissertation was to address relations between the dimensions of empathy, to extend our understanding of empathy development in adolescence, to investigate the role of empathy in social behavior, and to examine why some adolescents are more empathic than others. The first study examined the relations between empathy dimensions, and revealed that adolescents who showed stronger motor empathy in response to happiness or sadness (as measured with use of facial electromyography), consistently experienced higher affective state empathy, and indirectly, showed higher levels of cognitive state empathy. Remarkably, the study revealed no strong support for close links between adolescents’ trait and state empathy. The second study investigated the development of cognitive and affective trait empathy across adolescence. Interestingly, girls not only showed higher levels of cognitive and affective empathy than boys did, but also the developmental patterns showed striking gender differences. In addition, pubertal status was associated with boys affective empathy; boys who were physically more mature reported lower affective empathy compared with their physically less mature peers. The third study addressed whether adolescents high in affective empathy are more responsive to parental support than adolescents low in affective empathy. Interestingly, affective empathy indeed moderated the relation of parental support with both aggression and delinquency. Adolescents high in empathy benefited more from parental support than adolescents low in empathy. Remarkably, adolescents low in empathy not only benefited less from support, but even showed more aggression and delinquency when they experienced more parental support. The fourth study addressed the role of resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) in adolescents’ affective empathy and externalizing behavior. RSA appeared to moderate the association between parent-adolescent relationship quality and adolescents’ social functioning. For instance, parental support was a positive predictor of affective empathy for girls high in RSA, whereas the association was non-significant for girls low in RSA. Further, for boys with high RSA more negative interaction with parents predicted lower affective empathy, but remarkably, for boys low in RSA more negative interaction predicted more affective empathy. To conclude, this dissertation addressed important issues regarding adolescents’ empathy that have received little attention in previous research. The current research was the first to longitudinally investigate empathy development across adolescence, and to thoroughly address associations between empathy dimensions. The results highlight adolescence as a period of change in empathic tendencies, but call for future research to disentangle the processes that may underlie these changes. Moreover, results of this dissertation illustrate the usefulness of applying a multi-method approach in research on adolescents’ empathy.