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Characterising the relationship between empathy and emotion regulation
Empathy and emotion regulation are both processes that are vital for
effective social functioning and emotional wellbeing. Broadly speaking,
empathy refers to understanding and/or sharing another’s emotion, and
emotion regulation refers to the processes by which one manages
emotions. Despite increasing awareness that empathy and emotion
regulation may be closely related, there has been little empirical study of
this topic and the nature of the inter-relationships between their different
component processes are not well characterised.
This thesis addresses current gaps in the literature by utilising a range of
approaches, including self-report, behavioural, eye-tracking, and
psychophysiology measures, to examine the relationship between different
trait and task measures of empathy and emotion regulation. It was
predicted that the cognitive (i.e. understanding others’ emotions) and
affective (i.e. sharing others’ emotions) dimensions of empathy would show
different relationships with emotion regulation. Broadly speaking, it was
expected that emotion regulation abilities would be positively associated
with cognitive empathy but negatively associated with affective empathy.
There was strong support for the hypothesis that empathy and emotion
regulation are related. Furthermore, in most studies there was evidence to
suggest that cognitive and affective empathy are related to emotion
regulation abilities and behaviours in different ways. Divergent
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relationships between trait and task metrics of cognitive and affective
empathy were observed for various emotion regulation measures, including
habitual strategy use, implicit emotion regulation ability, and reappraisal
ability. While there was some support for the hypothesis that emotion
regulation abilities are positively associated with cognitive empathy but
negatively associated with affective empathy, conflicting findings were
observed.
This thesis makes a significant contribution to current knowledge and
represents an important step towards elucidating the nature of the
relationship between empathy and emotion regulation. The findings also
highlight some important considerations regarding the relationship
between different methods used to assess empathy and emotion regulation,
and prompt actionable research questions to be addressed by future work