The Necessity of Empathy Between Parents & Teenagers

Lissa, C. J., Hawk, S. T., & Meeus, W. H. (2017). The effects of affective and cognitive empathy on adolescents’ behavior and outcomes in conflicts with mothers. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 158(6), 32-45. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2017.01.002. Retreived February 13, 2017, from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022096516302235

Affective - Relating to feelings, mood, attitude or emotion.

Empathy - Sharing or recognizing another’s feelings.

Adolescent - A young adult, typically in early to middle teenage years.

Perspective taking - An adopted point of view, often in an argument or conflict

Conflict resolution - The reconciliation or solution after initial disagreement

Parent relationships - The bond between a child and parent

Introduction

    Increased conflict is becoming more common in homes fostering adolescents as the growing children seek a greater sense of independence and want to be less restricted and reliant on their parents. Such conflicts are normally subtle and can heal through time’s passing and a little bit of “quality time” between the two parties. However, some conflicts can escalate rapidly due to affective qualities of one or another family member. This can possibly result in verbal abuse, and while uncommon, physical violence on the part of the parent or even the child. Consequently, research pertaining to factors leading to conflict resolution is of great significance.

    A plausible factor lies in the empathetically rich mentality of adolescents, which has been previously observed to encourage quick prosocial resolution along with decreased aggression and negative emotions. The research at hand attempts to test if the same effect is present in experimental situational empathy. Special attention is given to the differences between affective empathy and cognitive empathy. The former refers to a direct emotional response, whereas the latter represents a mutual benefit where others’ points of view are considered heavily in one’s own perspective. While the distinction between the two has been the focus of much scientific testing, there has yet to be examination of the different effects and outcomes when each is induced separately.

    Studying adolescent-parent relationships has many potential discrepancies and obstacles. A directly distributed questionnaire is conceivable, however it may lead to biased results due to the varying perspectives of the parent and child during and after conflict. Another possibility lies in a recorded report from adolescents, however their sense of strong attachment could also lead to flawed results. Due to the high chances of biased results based on the interviewee’s perspective, it is easily foreseeable that observer reports would likely be more objective than those of the family members.

It was also imperative that conflict outcomes were also examined rather than only the conflict itself. Although different levels of empathy may be exhibited by adolescents, the outcomes may not be affected if the parent’s perspective takes a greater influence than the child’s.

Hypothesis - It was originally thought that both manipulations of empathy would promote satisfactory results for both parties. However, affective manipulation has the possibility of reducing justification or overall satisfaction in outcomes because the child may ease the mother’s distress at their own expense. Cognitive empathy would most likely lead to fair and satisfactory outcomes for both the child and the parent.

Methods

    Participants were 67 Dutch adolescent–mother couples (32 girls, mean age 15.51 years/32 mothers, mean age 48 years). Of the adolescents, 1 was enrolled in preparatory vocational education, 18 were enrolled in higher general education, and 48 were enrolled in preparatory scholarly education . Of the mothers, 8 reported having vocational education, 3 had a high school education, and 56 had a college education or higher. 96% of mothers were Dutch born. Each participant received 12.50 euros as compensation.

    The 2 experimental groups were represented by affective and cognitive empathy, and the control group was given no specific empathetic priming.

    Adolescents completed online questionnaires and were visited at home for the conflict discussion 1 week later. During the home visit, mothers identified an unsolved conflict topic. Adolescents were then randomly assigned to either the control condition or one of two empathy conditions: affective empathy or cognitive empathy. Next, the duos were asked to discuss the conflict topic for 8 minutes and try to conclude within that time. If the discussion had not come to a natural conclusion within 8 minutes, participants were asked to take another 2 minutes to come to a resolution. Conflict discussions were videotaped, and to increase privacy the experimenter waited in a separate room. Afterward, adolescents and mothers completed post-discussion questionnaires in order to evaluate their subjective satisfaction with the outcome of the discussion and perceived justification of the outcome for both sides. Participants were then informed about the research being conducted and the role they played in it.

    To prime the adolescents for their category of empathy, a short writing prompt was given depending on the intended frame of mind. For the affective and cognitive groups, the following prompt was distributed: Write about the [feelings and emotions]/[standpoint, arguments, and goals] of your mother with regard to the discussion topic. Try to write only about the [feelings and emotions]/[standpoint, arguments, and goals] of your mother. The first set of brackets in each instance was printed for the affective group, and the second set was printed for the cognitive group. As you can see, the affective group focuses on the emotional aspects of conflict whereas the cognitive group hones in on the opposing perception and how it can be mentally interpreted.

    Participants in the control group were instead asked to describe the objective circumstances, such as who was involved or where the situation developed. To reinforce the writing prompts, adolescents in the experimental conditions (affective/cognitive, respectively) were then asked to maintain a specific focus on their mother’s emotions (affective) or perspective (cognitive) during the upcoming discussion: During the discussion you are about to have with your mother, try to [be aware of her emotions]/[imagine what you would think in her place]. Try to focus on your mother’s [feelings and emotions. Try to sympathize with your mother]/[arguments and goals. Try to see things from your mother’s point of view]. Again, the first set was distributed to the affective group and the second to the cognitive group. The goals and focus of each group was clearly defined through these prompts.

    Adolescent participants rated the support subscale “Does your mother admire and respect you?” and the power subscale “To what extent is your mother the boss in your relationship?” on 5-point scales ranging from not at all to very much. Adolescents completed the empathic concern subscale, “My mother’s misfortunes do not usually disturb me a great deal” and the perspective taking subscale “I sometimes try to understand my mother better by imagining how things look from her perspective,” adapted to measure empathy toward mothers on 5-point scales. The ranges of these scales are not disclosed.

Results and Analysis

The effect of condition was analyzed using two “dummy” variables, which can be interpreted as the difference between the control condition and the affective condition (affective contrast) and between the control condition and the cognitive condition (cognitive contrast). We tested whether adding interactions of condition with dispositional empathy, demographics, relationship variables and adding interactions of demographics with relationship variables significantly increased explained variance. The resulting model was pruned by removing nonsignificant effects if the model fit remained unaffected. Final models are presented in Table 1, shown below.

Table 1 -

Summary of regression analyses.