Exercising empathy: The role of adolescents’ developing empathy in conflicts with parents

Abstract

The goal of the present dissertation was to provide insight into the role of adolescents’ empathy development in adolescent-parent conflict. Two empathy dimensions become increasingly developed in adolescence: emotional empathic concern for others, and the cognitive ability to engage in perspective taking. The first issue we examined is how empathy develops in adolescence. Our results showed that empathic concern predicted adolescents’ development of perspective taking. Furthermore, mothers’ perspective taking predicted their daughters’ perspective taking development. Finally, adolescents’ empathic concern was more stable than their perspective taking. Together, these findings suggest that perspective taking is particularly susceptible to development in adolescence. In another study, we examined differences between adolescents in developmental trajectories of empathy. Prior studies had focused instead on average developmental trajectories across adolescents. We identified groups of high-empathy, average-empathy, and low-empathy adolescents. The empathy differences between these groups became further amplified from early- to mid-adolescence. This highlights the importance of identifying adolescents’ low empathy early, to prevent adolescents from falling further behind their peers. The second issue we investigated is whether empathy development is related to adolescent-parent conflict frequency, and adolescents’ conflict resolution behaviors. We found that the aforementioned low-empathy adolescents and their parents reported significantly more frequent conflict throughout adolescence than the average- and high-empathy adolescents. In another study, we found that adolescents’ perspective taking development was more strongly associated with shifts towards constructive conflict behaviors than empathic concern. In an experiment, we investigated the effects of affective and cognitive empathy inductions on behaviors and outcomes in adolescent-mother conflict discussions. Inducing cognitive empathy reduced adolescents’ conflict escalation, and promoted other-oriented listening for low-perspective taking adolescents. Inducing affective empathy instead promoted active problem solving. For low-empathic concern adolescents, affective and cognitive empathy inductions both promoted outcome satisfaction, but only cognitive empathy promoted perceived fairness. These findings suggested that cognitive empathy in particular allows adolescents to distance themselves from the emotional heat of a conflict and listen to mothers’ point of view, leading to outcomes perceived as both satisfying and fair. Finally, we investigated whether high empathy adolescents are more sensitive to conflict. In one study, we found that high-empathy adolescents’ reports of conflict frequency were in agreement with both parents’ reports throughout adolescence, whereas average and low-empathy adolescents under-reported conflict. This suggests that high-empathy adolescents are more sensitive to the detection of conflict. In a second study, we found that conflict predicted significant emotion dysregulation for high-empathy adolescents, but not for average and low-empathy adolescents. This suggests that high-empathy adolescents are more sensitive to conflict-related emotion dysregulation. Thus, although high empathy was associated with more prosocial conflict behavior across two studies, high-empathy adolescents’ greater sensitivity to conflict suggests that the benefits of high empathy may depend on the family context. When adolescent-parent conflict is relatively frequent, high empathy may render adolescents vulnerable. Parents might thus be well advised to exercise their own empathy and consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of high versus low-empathy adolescents, and attempt to address adolescents’ developing perspective taking to resolve matters amicably.