The Relationship between Empathy and Attachment in Children and Adolescents: Three-Level Meta-Analyses.

Xizheng Xu,Yunpeng Wu,Shaoying Gong,Zhiqiang Liu

doi:10.3390/ijerph19031391

Abstract

Empathy is one of the leading social abilities to understand or feel the emotions of other people. Attachment is thought to be a critical influential factor of empathy, as revealed by attachment theory and experimental studies, while empathy is also believed to facilitate the quality of attachment. Although many studies are conducted concerning the two subjects, the direction and magnitude of their relationship still remain unclear. In order to clarify the discrepant results in the previous study and explore the moderators in the empathy–attachment association, three-level meta-analyses were conducted in the present work. Based on 212 effect sizes from 59 samples in 50 studies with a total of 24,572 participants, random effect model analyses showed that empathy was insignificantly correlated with anxious attachment, significantly negatively correlated with avoidant attachment, and significantly positively correlated with secure attachment. The meta-analytic results indicated that children and adolescents with high secure attachment tend to show more empathy than those with low secure attachment. The meta-regression model revealed significant effects of the empathy dimension, culture, empathy measurement tools, and publication state. Additionally, implications and future directions for the empathy–attachment relationship were also discussed.

Highlights

Empathy is an important channel for health improvement and social adaptation of individuals, laying a foundation for moral development and positive outcomes [1,2]
For the empathy and secure attachment model, the results showed two outlier effect sizes in our samples
The present three-level meta-analyses tested the relationship between empathy and attachment in children and adolescents, clarified the magnitude of the relationship between empathy and attachment, and found some influential factors, such as empathy dimension, culture, measuring instruments, and so on

Summary

Introduction

Empathy is an important channel for health improvement and social adaptation of individuals, laying a foundation for moral development and positive outcomes [1,2]. Empathy and attachment development in children and adolescents is a critical socialization content influenced by all kinds of individual and context variables [8]. It is necessary to further clarify the relationship between empathy and attachment in children and adolescents through three-level meta-analyses based on the inclusion criteria of previous studies. The moderating variables that may affect the relationship between them should be explored to determine the boundary conditions of their influence. The exploration of these problems will contribute to both the theories of attachment and empathy and shed light on practices of empathy intervening measures

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion