Feeling for and Without Others : Assessing the Relationship Between Empathy and Loneliness in Children and Adolescents

Abstract

This study investigated the relation between empathy and loneliness in Finnish children and adolescents. Empathy refers to the ability to share and understand others’ emotional states, and it can be divided into three main components. Affective empathy refers to an emotional response to another person’s emotional display, cognitive empathy to understanding the perspective of the other person, and prosocial motivation to the tendency to support the other person one empathizes with. Loneliness refers to experienced deficiency in one’s social relationships, and it can be divided into two dimensions: peer network and dyadic. Peer network loneliness means the absence of a social network, whereas dyadic loneliness means the absence of emotionally intimate, close attachment. My research question was whether peer network loneliness and dyadic loneliness can predict different empathy components. Based on previous research, my hypothesis was that both higher peer network and dyadic loneliness would predict lower scores for all three empathy components.

The data was collected as part of Tampere University’s research project “Tunteet läpi elämän” in 2021 and 2022. The final sample consisted of 81 Finnish children and adolescents between 8 and 15 years old. Each participant filled out two self-report questionnaires; one to measure empathy (Empathy Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents, EmQue-CA) and one to measure loneliness (Peer Network and Dyadic Loneliness Scale, PNDLS). The association between empathy and loneliness scores was examined using linear regression analysis.

In line with my hypothesis, cognitive empathy and prosocial motivation were negatively associated with dyadic loneliness. However, the current study found no association between dyadic loneliness and affective empathy, nor between peer network loneliness and any empathy component.

The results of this study show that assessing empathy and loneliness as multidimensional constructs can provide a more comprehensive understanding of these two phenomena. The findings differed significantly based on the type of loneliness and the component of empathy. The findings of this study suggest that only dyadic loneliness is linked to empathy, and more specifically to the cognitive and prosocial components. Considerably more research on the topic is still needed, and in the future the association between empathy and loneliness should be studied more both in children and adults, without diminishing the multidimensionality of either phenomenon.