engleski

Empathic personality – relations between two forms of empathy and basic personality traits

Empathy, in the broadest sense, refers to the ability of understanding and sharing feelings of others, and is an essential part of our social functioning. Empathy is usually conceptualized as having two components: a cognitive and an affective, which is also confirmed by recent neuropsychological research. However, there has been an ongoing debate on how to optimally capture individual differences in empathic processing. One of the ways to measure individual differences in cognitive thinking patterns and emotional tendencies is via personality traits. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore relations between two forms of empathy and basic personality traits. Data was collected within a larger on-line study on 343 participants from various faculties in Croatia (290 female and 53 male) with the mean age of 21.60 years (SD = 2.92). Participants completed the short form of Empathy Quotient (Lawrence et al., 2004), as well as HEXACO-30 (Petrović & Međedović, 2013) as the measure of the basic personality traits, which assesses six dimensions of personality: Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness (versus Anger), Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience. Results of hierarchical regression analyses showed that, after controlling for gender, personality traits explained 14.3% of the variance of cognitive empathy and 26.5% of affective empathy. Cognitive empathy was positively predicted by Extraversion and Openness to Experience, while affective empathy was positively predicted by Emotionality, Extraversion and Honesty-Humility. These results provide some interesting insights into relations between empathy and basic personality traits, but, due to some methodological constraints, should be replicated with longer personality measures and more gender-balanced samples.

personality, cognitive empathy, affective empathy

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