International Journal of Psychology, 2014 DOI: 10.1002/ijop.12075
Peer acceptance among Chinese adolescents: The role of emotional empathy, cognitive empathy and gender Heqing Huang1,2 and Yanjie Su1 1 Department 2 Present
of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing, China address: College of Preschool Education, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China
P
revious studies have found mixed results on the relationship between empathy and peer acceptance. Emotional and cognitive components of empathy were hypothesised to play different roles in peer acceptance, and the relationship between empathy and peer acceptance differed across genders. In this study, 375 Chinese adolescents completed self-report measures of emotional and cognitive empathy. They also provided peer nominations that allowed for the determination of social preference and social impact scores. The results showed that a boy’s cognitive empathy positively correlated with the extent to which he was liked by his male classmates, whereas a girl’s cognitive empathy positively correlated with her social impact among her female classmates. This study suggests that empathy does not affect peer acceptance among adolescents uniformly; instead, gender plays a determinative role in the dialectics between social acceptance and empathy. Keywords: Peer acceptance; Social preference; Social impact; Emotional empathy; Cognitive empathy.
Peer relationships are critical to the emotional and cognitive development of a child, as well as to his or her subsequent social development. For adolescents, interacting with peers consumes most of one’s time (Perry-Parrish & Zeman, 2011), and relationships with peers reach a level of critical importance (LaFontana & Cillessen, 2009). Empathy, the capacity to feel and understand another individual’s feelings in relation to oneself, is an important interpersonal function (Scheithauer & Bull, 2008). Previous studies have found that empathy has varied implications on peer acceptance. Some studies have suggested that peer acceptance is significantly associated with empathy. Children who are liked have been found to have higher levels of empathy than those who are rejected by their peers (Dekovié & Gerris, 1994). Significant positive relationships have also been found between adolescents’ ratings of being liked and their level of empathy (Eisenberg, Liew, & Pidada, 2004). In contrast, other investigators have found non-significant correlations between empathy and peer acceptance (Caravita, DiBlasio, & Salmivalli, 2009). The inconsistent pattern of results may stem from the fact that researchers conceptualised and measured peer
acceptance and empathy differently. First, according to Coie and Dodge (1983), peer acceptance includes two dimensions: social preference (the extent to which an individual is liked by his or her peers) and social impact (the degree to which an individual can influence his or her peers). Social preference and social impact represent two types of interactions and adaptations in society, as the former ensures one’s survival through establishing harmonious relationships with others and the latter implies social relationships founded upon the extent to which one can influence others. However, previous studies have stressed only one of the two aspects of peer acceptance. Second, empathy is a multidimensional construct that involves both cognitive and emotional processes (de Waal, 2008). While emotional empathy involves experiencing feelings of compassion, warmth and concern in response to other people, cognitive empathy requires the ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of others. According to the integrated model of emotional processes and cognition in social information processing (Crick & Dodge, 1994; Lemerise & Arsenio, 2000), both aspects of empathy are regarded as indispensable foundations for social success, although they play different roles.
Correspondence should be addressed to Yanjie Su, Department of Psychology, Peking University, 5 Yiheyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100871 China. (E-mail: [email protected]). This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China 31170995, 31371040, and also by the National Basic Research Program (973 Program: 2010CB833904). We are grateful to all the individuals who participated in our study or provided assistance.
© 2014 International Union of Psychological Science
2
HUANG AND SU
Emotional empathy forms affective links between individuals and facilitates interpersonal harmony, whereas cognitive empathy facilitates an accurate understanding of the mental states of others (de Waal, 2008). Therefore, the relationship between peer acceptance and empathy may be more complex than researchers have expected. To reveal the relationships between empathy and peer acceptance, more nuanced conceptualisations of both empathy and peer acceptance are required. The conflicting results may also be partly explained by gender as the relationship between empathy and peer acceptance may vary across genders. Beginning in preschool, children experience gender segregation, which means that boys and girls tend to interact more with peers of the same gender (Card & Hodges, 2007). Children may even have more negative evaluations of their opposite-gender peers (Duncan & Cohen, 1995). Gender segregation is most pronounced during middle childhood and early adolescence (Hartup, 1983). Accordingly, as empathy may play different roles for boys than it does for girls, it is important to investigate the relationship between these two constructs in boys and girls. Thus, the aim of this study was to explore the relationships between social preference, social impact, emotional empathy and cognitive empathy in Chinese adolescents, and to investigate the role that gender plays in these relations. METHOD Participants The participants included 375 (191 boys, 50.93%) students in the seventh and eighth grades (M = 13.94 years, SD = .83) from 10 randomly selected classes in two middle schools in China. There were 162 students (100 boys, 61.73%) from the seventh grade and 213 (90 boys, 42.25%) from the eighth grade. Most of the students came from middle-class families. The rates of participation within each classroom ranged from 90.24 to 100%, and the mean of the participation was 92.33%. Measurement Peer nomination In this study, a participant’s peer acceptance was determined using the method described by Coie and Dodge (1983). Children were asked to write down three classmates with whom they most liked to play, and three with whom they least liked to play. All peer nominations were performed by free recall, and both same-gender and cross-gender nominations were allowed. The positive nominations (being liked) and negative nominations (being disliked) of all children were standardised into
three groups within each class: nominations across gender, boys’ nominations of boys and girls’ nominations of girls. The peer nomination scores that indicated a child’s like or dislike for a peer were combined to create two new dimensions. The Z score of negative nominations was subtracted from the Z score of positive nominations to calculate an overall social preference score. Using the same method, we computed the boys’ social preference in the boys group and the girls’ social preference in the girls group. An overall social impact score was computed by summing the Z score of negative nominations and the Z score of positive nominations. We derived the social impact of boys using data collected within the boys’ group and the social impact of girls using data collected within the girls’ group. Empathy A Chinese variant (IRI-C, Zhang, Dong, & Wang, 2010) of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1983) was used to assess empathy among teenagers. The IRI is a 28-item self-reported questionnaire measuring different dimensions of empathy, and it is comprised four 7-item subscales (perspective taking, empathic concern, personal distress and fantasy). Among these four subscales, two subscales were used in this study. “Perspective taking” was used to measure the individuals’ cognitive tendency to place themselves in the position of others, and it reflects the cognitive aspect of empathy (e.g. “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective”). The subscale “empathic concern” was designed to test one’s capacity to experience feelings of compassion, warmth and concern in response to other people, and it reflects the emotional aspect of empathy (e.g. “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me”). Using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), participants were asked to report the extent to which these statements applied to them. Both empathic concern and perspective taking demonstrated adequate internal reliability with alpha of .68 and .72, respectively. RESULT Because classes and individuals are defined as nested structures, hierarchical linear modelling (HLM) was used to test whether there were differences between the classes. The resulting intraclass coefficients (ICC) were .02 at the class level, which means that 2% of the variance were attributable to the class level. The further analysis found that these variances between classes did not significantly differ from 0, χ2 (9) = .65, p = 0.21. Because there were no significant differences between the classes, we only conducted analyses on the individual level. © 2014 International Union of Psychological Science
PEER ACCEPTANCE, EMPATHY AND GENDER
To examine whether the participants interacted more with same-gender classmates than with opposite other-gender classmates, nominations by and to the same- and other-gender classmates were examined. The results found that girls nominated 18.80% and boys nominated 13.02% opposite-gender classmates. The results of the two paired sample t-tests suggested that both boys, t(190) = −29.11, p < .01, and girls, t(190) = 20.97, p < .01, nominated significantly fewer opposite-gender than same-gender classmates. Additionally, nominations by opposite -gender classmates also took a small percentages for both genders, with boys at 9.94% and girls at 13.11%. Both genders received significantly fewer nominations from the opposite-gender classmates, for boys, t(190) = −16.46, p < .01, and for girls, t(183) = 15.23, p < .01. Therefore, the nominations of the opposite-gender group were not examined in this study. The statistical results describing empathy and peer acceptance are presented in Table 1. Independent sample t-tests were also conducted to explore whether girls and boys differed in peer acceptance and empathy. The results showed that, girls endorsed higher levels of emotional empathy than boys, t(355) = 6.01, p < .001, but were equal with boys in cognitive empathy, t(366) = 1.45, p = .15. The results also showed that with respect to the class level, girls had the same social preference, t(373) = 1.75, p = .19, and social impact, t(373) = .01, p = .64, as boys. Thus, it can be concluded that there was no gender difference between the two dimensions with respect to adolescent peer acceptance. The consequent correlation analyses, however, revealed gender differences in the relationship between the two dimensions of peer acceptance (Table 2). For girls, an individual girl’s social preference and social impact were negatively related, r = −.19, p < .05. This result suggests that the more a girl is influential with a group of girls, the less she is liked by her female peers. On the contrary, there was no identifiable correlation between the two variables for boys. Furthermore, the correlation analyses also suggested distinct patterns in the relationship between empathy and peer acceptance that appear to be gender-specific (Table 2). For example, a girl’s emotional empathy correlated positively with her social impact in a girls’ group, r = .177, p < .05, whereas a boy’s cognitive empathy
3
positively related with his social preference in a boys’ group, r = .213, p < .05. DISCUSSION This study investigated the role of gender in the relationships between cognitive and affective aspects of empathy and peer acceptance, in terms of social impact and social preference. The results suggested a gender-specific pattern of peer acceptance and its relation with empathy. This study found that most interaction in a class were among same-gender peers, a result that was in accordance with Wölfer, Cortina, and Baumert (2012) who determined that in Western cultures, the majority of adolescent peer groups were homogeneous with regard to gender as only 10% peer groups were gender-mixed. Thus, it appears that gender segregation is universal. However, this study did not find any gender difference with respect to social preference and social impact on class level, a result that was contrary to the findings of studies of Western culture, which indicated obvious advantages towards girls in peer acceptance (Wölfer et al., 2012) but disadvantages towards girls in dominance hierarchy (Crockett, Losoff, & Petersen, 1984). However, our study found gender difference in the correlative pattern between the two dimensions of peer acceptance. While there was no salient relationship between social preference and social impact regarding boys, the two variables were negatively related for girls. It seems that, at least in Chinese adolescents, the more influential a girl is, the less likely she is to be liked by her girlfriends, and vice versa. The negative correlation between a girl’s social preference and social impact may reflect, at least in Chinese culture, the unique gender prototypical female. Finally, the results also suggested a gender-specific relationship between empathy and peer acceptance. Among boys, cognitive empathy correlated positively with the level of a boy’s social preference, whereas among girls, emotional empathy correlated positively with the level of a girl’s social impact. The result of this study supported Rose and Rudolph’s gender-specific peer socialisation model (Rose & Rudolph, 2011). There are also studies of Western culture that demonstrated similar
TABLE 1 Descriptive statistics of empathy and peer acceptance of boys and girls Boys (n = 191) M Social preference Social impact Emotional empathy Cognitive empathy
−0.11 −0.03 17.56 18.55
Girls (n = 184)
Total (N = 375)
SD
M
SD
1.69 1.15 4.78 4.58
0.11 0.02 18.55 21.67
1.51 1.17 4.58 5.21
© 2014 International Union of Psychological Science
M 0.00 −0.01 17.92 20.12
SD 1.60 1.16 4.78 5.14
4
HUANG AND SU TABLE 2 Correlations between empathy and social acceptance of boys and girls Girls
1 Emotional empathy 2 Cognitive empathy 3 SP by same-gender peers 4 SI by same-gender peers
1
2
1
.410** 1
Boys 3
4
.054 −.010 1
.177* .064 −.191** 1
1
2
3
4
1
.338**
.098 .213* 1
−.018 −.004 −.037 1
1
SP = social preference, SI = social impact. *p < .05. **p < .01.
results. For instance, a considerate boy is more likely to be accepted by his peers (Braza et al., 2009), whereas emotional empathy positively predicts peer acceptance among girls but negatively predicts peer acceptance among boys (Oberle, Schonert-Reichl, & Thomson, 2010). On the one hand, our results indicated that there were distinct rules for each of the two groups. One may say that, boys use their heads to be liked by other boys, whereas girls use their hearts to influence other girls. On the other hand, another potential explanation for these findings could be the peers’ reactions to what they perceive the individuals to be like. For example, for adolescent males, being emotionally expressive in the form of empathy could be considered undesirable (Oberle et al., 2010). This study also suggested potential cultural differences. While in a Western sample, negative relationship was found between emotional empathy and peer acceptance (Oberle et al., 2010), no such relationship was found in this study. This fact may due to the different gender-related socialisation in Western and Chinese cultures (Eisenberg et al., 2004; Leaper, 2013). The present research provides valuable insights into how peer acceptance is related to social competences, such as empathy. Furthermore, the Chinese sample adds to our understanding of this issue in non-Western cultures. In the future, cross-culture studies are needed to compare directly the difference between Chinese and Western samples. Important limitations to this study must be mentioned. First, the cross-sectional design in this study focused solely on the adolescence period. Therefore, it is unclear that under what circumstances gender affects the interplay between peer acceptance and empathy and how it changes in subsequent developmental stages. Second, our empathy scores were based on self-reports. Although we utilised the most widely used measures of empathy, societal stereotypes could bias the evaluation of self-reports. Therefore, further studies should include implicit measures or physiological indicators, such as electroencephalography. Manuscript received April 2013 Revised manuscript accepted April 2014
REFERENCES Braza, F., Azurmendi, A., Muñoz, J. M., Carreras, M. R., Braza, P., García, A., & Sánchez-Martín, J. R. (2009). Social cognitive predictors of peer acceptance at age 5 and the moderating effects of gender. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 27, 703–716. doi:10.1348/026151008X360666. Caravita, S., DiBlasio, P., & Salmivalli, C. (2009). Unique and interactive effects of empathy and social status on involvement in bullying. Social Development, 18, 140–163. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9507.2008.00465.x. Card, N. A., & Hodges, E. V. E. (2007). Victimization within mutually antipathetic peer relationships. Social Development, 16, 479–496. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9507.2007. 00394.x. Coie, J. D., & Dodge, K. A. (1983). Continuity of children’s social status: A five-year longitudinal study. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 29, 261–282. Crick, N. R., & Dodge, K. A. (1994). A review and reformulation of social information-processing mechanisms in children’s social adjustment. Psychological Bulletin, 115, 74–101. Crockett, L., Losoff, M., & Petersen, A. C. (1984). Perceptions of the peer group and friendship in early adolescence. The Journal of Early Adolescence, 4, 155–181. Davis, M. H. (1983). The effects of dispositional empathy on emotional reactions and helping: A multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality, 51, 167–184. Dekovié, M., & Gerris, J. R. M. (1994). Developmental analysis of social cognitive and behavioral differences between popular and rejected children. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 15, 367–386. Duncan, M. K., & Cohen, R. (1995). Liking within the peer group as a function of children: Sociometric status and sex. Child Study Journal, 25, 265–287. Eisenberg, N., Liew, J., & Pidada, S. U. (2004). The longitudinal relations of regulation and emotionality to quality of Indonesian children’s socioemotional functioning. Developmental Psychology, 40, 805–812. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.40.5.790. Hartup, W. W. (1983). Peer relations. In H. H. Mussen (Ed.), Handbook of child psychology (Vol. 4, 4th ed., pp. 103–196). New York, NY: Wiley. LaFontana, K., & Cillessen, A. (2009). Developmental changes in the priority of perceived status in childhood and adolescence. Social Development, 19, 130–147. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9507.2008.00522.x. © 2014 International Union of Psychological Science
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Leaper, C. (2013). Gender development during childhood. In P. D. Zelazo (Ed.), Oxford handbook of developmental psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 327–377). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Lemerise, E. A., & Arsenio, W. F. (2000). An integrated model of emotion processed and cognition in social information processing. Child Development, 71, 107–118. Oberle, E., Schonert-Reichl, K. A., & Thomson, K. C. (2010). Understanding the link between social and emotional well-being and peer relations in early adolescence: Gender-specific predictors of peer acceptance. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 39, 1330–1342. doi:10.1007/s10964-009-9486-9. Perry-Parrish, C., & Zeman, J. (2011). Relations among sadness regulation, peer acceptance, and social functioning in early adolescence: The role of gender. Social Development, 20, 135–153. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9507.2009.00568.x. Rose, A. J., & Rudolph, K. D. (2011). A review of sex differences in peer relationship processes: Potential
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trade-offs for the emotional and behavioral development of girls and boys. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 98–131. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.132.1.98. Scheithauer, H., & Bull, H. D. (2008). Empathy and perspective-taking: Risk or protective factors or risk and protective factors in the development of relational aggression in adolescence? International Journal of Psychology, 43, 398. doi:10.1016/j.adolescence.2007.09.007. de Waal, F. (2008). Putting the altruism back into altruism: The evolution of empathy. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 1–22. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093625. Wölfer, R., Cortina, K. S., & Baumert, J. (2012). Embeddedness and empathy: How the social network shapes adolescents’ social understanding. Journal of Adolescence, 35, 1295–1305. doi:10.1016/j.adolescence.2012.04.015. Zhang, F., Dong, Y., & Wang, K. (2010). Reliability and validity of the Chinese version of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index-C (in Chinese). Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology, 18, 155–157.
Peer acceptance among Chinese adolescents: The role of emotional empathy, cognitive empathy and gender Heqing Huang1,2 and Yanjie Su1 1 Department 2 Present
of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing, China address: College of Preschool Education, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China
P
revious studies have found mixed results on the relationship between empathy and peer acceptance. Emotional and cognitive components of empathy were hypothesised to play different roles in peer acceptance, and the relationship between empathy and peer acceptance differed across genders. In this study, 375 Chinese adolescents completed self-report measures of emotional and cognitive empathy. They also provided peer nominations that allowed for the determination of social preference and social impact scores. The results showed that a boy’s cognitive empathy positively correlated with the extent to which he was liked by his male classmates, whereas a girl’s cognitive empathy positively correlated with her social impact among her female classmates. This study suggests that empathy does not affect peer acceptance among adolescents uniformly; instead, gender plays a determinative role in the dialectics between social acceptance and empathy. Keywords: Peer acceptance; Social preference; Social impact; Emotional empathy; Cognitive empathy.
Peer relationships are critical to the emotional and cognitive development of a child, as well as to his or her subsequent social development. For adolescents, interacting with peers consumes most of one’s time (Perry-Parrish & Zeman, 2011), and relationships with peers reach a level of critical importance (LaFontana & Cillessen, 2009). Empathy, the capacity to feel and understand another individual’s feelings in relation to oneself, is an important interpersonal function (Scheithauer & Bull, 2008). Previous studies have found that empathy has varied implications on peer acceptance. Some studies have suggested that peer acceptance is significantly associated with empathy. Children who are liked have been found to have higher levels of empathy than those who are rejected by their peers (Dekovié & Gerris, 1994). Significant positive relationships have also been found between adolescents’ ratings of being liked and their level of empathy (Eisenberg, Liew, & Pidada, 2004). In contrast, other investigators have found non-significant correlations between empathy and peer acceptance (Caravita, DiBlasio, & Salmivalli, 2009). The inconsistent pattern of results may stem from the fact that researchers conceptualised and measured peer
acceptance and empathy differently. First, according to Coie and Dodge (1983), peer acceptance includes two dimensions: social preference (the extent to which an individual is liked by his or her peers) and social impact (the degree to which an individual can influence his or her peers). Social preference and social impact represent two types of interactions and adaptations in society, as the former ensures one’s survival through establishing harmonious relationships with others and the latter implies social relationships founded upon the extent to which one can influence others. However, previous studies have stressed only one of the two aspects of peer acceptance. Second, empathy is a multidimensional construct that involves both cognitive and emotional processes (de Waal, 2008). While emotional empathy involves experiencing feelings of compassion, warmth and concern in response to other people, cognitive empathy requires the ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of others. According to the integrated model of emotional processes and cognition in social information processing (Crick & Dodge, 1994; Lemerise & Arsenio, 2000), both aspects of empathy are regarded as indispensable foundations for social success, although they play different roles.
Correspondence should be addressed to Yanjie Su, Department of Psychology, Peking University, 5 Yiheyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100871 China. (E-mail: [email protected]). This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China 31170995, 31371040, and also by the National Basic Research Program (973 Program: 2010CB833904). We are grateful to all the individuals who participated in our study or provided assistance.
© 2014 International Union of Psychological Science
2
HUANG AND SU
Emotional empathy forms affective links between individuals and facilitates interpersonal harmony, whereas cognitive empathy facilitates an accurate understanding of the mental states of others (de Waal, 2008). Therefore, the relationship between peer acceptance and empathy may be more complex than researchers have expected. To reveal the relationships between empathy and peer acceptance, more nuanced conceptualisations of both empathy and peer acceptance are required. The conflicting results may also be partly explained by gender as the relationship between empathy and peer acceptance may vary across genders. Beginning in preschool, children experience gender segregation, which means that boys and girls tend to interact more with peers of the same gender (Card & Hodges, 2007). Children may even have more negative evaluations of their opposite-gender peers (Duncan & Cohen, 1995). Gender segregation is most pronounced during middle childhood and early adolescence (Hartup, 1983). Accordingly, as empathy may play different roles for boys than it does for girls, it is important to investigate the relationship between these two constructs in boys and girls. Thus, the aim of this study was to explore the relationships between social preference, social impact, emotional empathy and cognitive empathy in Chinese adolescents, and to investigate the role that gender plays in these relations. METHOD Participants The participants included 375 (191 boys, 50.93%) students in the seventh and eighth grades (M = 13.94 years, SD = .83) from 10 randomly selected classes in two middle schools in China. There were 162 students (100 boys, 61.73%) from the seventh grade and 213 (90 boys, 42.25%) from the eighth grade. Most of the students came from middle-class families. The rates of participation within each classroom ranged from 90.24 to 100%, and the mean of the participation was 92.33%. Measurement Peer nomination In this study, a participant’s peer acceptance was determined using the method described by Coie and Dodge (1983). Children were asked to write down three classmates with whom they most liked to play, and three with whom they least liked to play. All peer nominations were performed by free recall, and both same-gender and cross-gender nominations were allowed. The positive nominations (being liked) and negative nominations (being disliked) of all children were standardised into
three groups within each class: nominations across gender, boys’ nominations of boys and girls’ nominations of girls. The peer nomination scores that indicated a child’s like or dislike for a peer were combined to create two new dimensions. The Z score of negative nominations was subtracted from the Z score of positive nominations to calculate an overall social preference score. Using the same method, we computed the boys’ social preference in the boys group and the girls’ social preference in the girls group. An overall social impact score was computed by summing the Z score of negative nominations and the Z score of positive nominations. We derived the social impact of boys using data collected within the boys’ group and the social impact of girls using data collected within the girls’ group. Empathy A Chinese variant (IRI-C, Zhang, Dong, & Wang, 2010) of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1983) was used to assess empathy among teenagers. The IRI is a 28-item self-reported questionnaire measuring different dimensions of empathy, and it is comprised four 7-item subscales (perspective taking, empathic concern, personal distress and fantasy). Among these four subscales, two subscales were used in this study. “Perspective taking” was used to measure the individuals’ cognitive tendency to place themselves in the position of others, and it reflects the cognitive aspect of empathy (e.g. “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective”). The subscale “empathic concern” was designed to test one’s capacity to experience feelings of compassion, warmth and concern in response to other people, and it reflects the emotional aspect of empathy (e.g. “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me”). Using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), participants were asked to report the extent to which these statements applied to them. Both empathic concern and perspective taking demonstrated adequate internal reliability with alpha of .68 and .72, respectively. RESULT Because classes and individuals are defined as nested structures, hierarchical linear modelling (HLM) was used to test whether there were differences between the classes. The resulting intraclass coefficients (ICC) were .02 at the class level, which means that 2% of the variance were attributable to the class level. The further analysis found that these variances between classes did not significantly differ from 0, χ2 (9) = .65, p = 0.21. Because there were no significant differences between the classes, we only conducted analyses on the individual level. © 2014 International Union of Psychological Science
PEER ACCEPTANCE, EMPATHY AND GENDER
To examine whether the participants interacted more with same-gender classmates than with opposite other-gender classmates, nominations by and to the same- and other-gender classmates were examined. The results found that girls nominated 18.80% and boys nominated 13.02% opposite-gender classmates. The results of the two paired sample t-tests suggested that both boys, t(190) = −29.11, p < .01, and girls, t(190) = 20.97, p < .01, nominated significantly fewer opposite-gender than same-gender classmates. Additionally, nominations by opposite -gender classmates also took a small percentages for both genders, with boys at 9.94% and girls at 13.11%. Both genders received significantly fewer nominations from the opposite-gender classmates, for boys, t(190) = −16.46, p < .01, and for girls, t(183) = 15.23, p < .01. Therefore, the nominations of the opposite-gender group were not examined in this study. The statistical results describing empathy and peer acceptance are presented in Table 1. Independent sample t-tests were also conducted to explore whether girls and boys differed in peer acceptance and empathy. The results showed that, girls endorsed higher levels of emotional empathy than boys, t(355) = 6.01, p < .001, but were equal with boys in cognitive empathy, t(366) = 1.45, p = .15. The results also showed that with respect to the class level, girls had the same social preference, t(373) = 1.75, p = .19, and social impact, t(373) = .01, p = .64, as boys. Thus, it can be concluded that there was no gender difference between the two dimensions with respect to adolescent peer acceptance. The consequent correlation analyses, however, revealed gender differences in the relationship between the two dimensions of peer acceptance (Table 2). For girls, an individual girl’s social preference and social impact were negatively related, r = −.19, p < .05. This result suggests that the more a girl is influential with a group of girls, the less she is liked by her female peers. On the contrary, there was no identifiable correlation between the two variables for boys. Furthermore, the correlation analyses also suggested distinct patterns in the relationship between empathy and peer acceptance that appear to be gender-specific (Table 2). For example, a girl’s emotional empathy correlated positively with her social impact in a girls’ group, r = .177, p < .05, whereas a boy’s cognitive empathy
3
positively related with his social preference in a boys’ group, r = .213, p < .05. DISCUSSION This study investigated the role of gender in the relationships between cognitive and affective aspects of empathy and peer acceptance, in terms of social impact and social preference. The results suggested a gender-specific pattern of peer acceptance and its relation with empathy. This study found that most interaction in a class were among same-gender peers, a result that was in accordance with Wölfer, Cortina, and Baumert (2012) who determined that in Western cultures, the majority of adolescent peer groups were homogeneous with regard to gender as only 10% peer groups were gender-mixed. Thus, it appears that gender segregation is universal. However, this study did not find any gender difference with respect to social preference and social impact on class level, a result that was contrary to the findings of studies of Western culture, which indicated obvious advantages towards girls in peer acceptance (Wölfer et al., 2012) but disadvantages towards girls in dominance hierarchy (Crockett, Losoff, & Petersen, 1984). However, our study found gender difference in the correlative pattern between the two dimensions of peer acceptance. While there was no salient relationship between social preference and social impact regarding boys, the two variables were negatively related for girls. It seems that, at least in Chinese adolescents, the more influential a girl is, the less likely she is to be liked by her girlfriends, and vice versa. The negative correlation between a girl’s social preference and social impact may reflect, at least in Chinese culture, the unique gender prototypical female. Finally, the results also suggested a gender-specific relationship between empathy and peer acceptance. Among boys, cognitive empathy correlated positively with the level of a boy’s social preference, whereas among girls, emotional empathy correlated positively with the level of a girl’s social impact. The result of this study supported Rose and Rudolph’s gender-specific peer socialisation model (Rose & Rudolph, 2011). There are also studies of Western culture that demonstrated similar
TABLE 1 Descriptive statistics of empathy and peer acceptance of boys and girls Boys (n = 191) M Social preference Social impact Emotional empathy Cognitive empathy
−0.11 −0.03 17.56 18.55
Girls (n = 184)
Total (N = 375)
SD
M
SD
1.69 1.15 4.78 4.58
0.11 0.02 18.55 21.67
1.51 1.17 4.58 5.21
© 2014 International Union of Psychological Science
M 0.00 −0.01 17.92 20.12
SD 1.60 1.16 4.78 5.14
4
HUANG AND SU TABLE 2 Correlations between empathy and social acceptance of boys and girls Girls
1 Emotional empathy 2 Cognitive empathy 3 SP by same-gender peers 4 SI by same-gender peers
1
2
1
.410** 1
Boys 3
4
.054 −.010 1
.177* .064 −.191** 1
1
2
3
4
1
.338**
.098 .213* 1
−.018 −.004 −.037 1
1
SP = social preference, SI = social impact. *p < .05. **p < .01.
results. For instance, a considerate boy is more likely to be accepted by his peers (Braza et al., 2009), whereas emotional empathy positively predicts peer acceptance among girls but negatively predicts peer acceptance among boys (Oberle, Schonert-Reichl, & Thomson, 2010). On the one hand, our results indicated that there were distinct rules for each of the two groups. One may say that, boys use their heads to be liked by other boys, whereas girls use their hearts to influence other girls. On the other hand, another potential explanation for these findings could be the peers’ reactions to what they perceive the individuals to be like. For example, for adolescent males, being emotionally expressive in the form of empathy could be considered undesirable (Oberle et al., 2010). This study also suggested potential cultural differences. While in a Western sample, negative relationship was found between emotional empathy and peer acceptance (Oberle et al., 2010), no such relationship was found in this study. This fact may due to the different gender-related socialisation in Western and Chinese cultures (Eisenberg et al., 2004; Leaper, 2013). The present research provides valuable insights into how peer acceptance is related to social competences, such as empathy. Furthermore, the Chinese sample adds to our understanding of this issue in non-Western cultures. In the future, cross-culture studies are needed to compare directly the difference between Chinese and Western samples. Important limitations to this study must be mentioned. First, the cross-sectional design in this study focused solely on the adolescence period. Therefore, it is unclear that under what circumstances gender affects the interplay between peer acceptance and empathy and how it changes in subsequent developmental stages. Second, our empathy scores were based on self-reports. Although we utilised the most widely used measures of empathy, societal stereotypes could bias the evaluation of self-reports. Therefore, further studies should include implicit measures or physiological indicators, such as electroencephalography. Manuscript received April 2013 Revised manuscript accepted April 2014
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