Abstract

PINHO, Vanessa Dordron de; FERNANDES, Conceição Santos  and  FALCONE, Eliane Mary de Oliveira. Influence of age and schooling degree on adults’ empathic experience. Estud. pesqui. psicol. [online]. 2011, vol.11, n.2, pp. 456-471. ISSN 1808-4281.

Currently, theorists start sharing a view of human empathic experience like a multidimensional phenomenon influenced by several aspects, among them age and scholarity level. This study aims to investigate relations between empathic social skill and these two sociodemographic variables. The sample was composed by 537 adult participants. The empathic skill was studied across four dimentions of Inventário de Empatia (I.E.): Perspective Taking, Interpersonal Flexibility, Altruism, and Affective Sensibility. The findings have pointed statistically significant correlations between age and some aspects of empathy: altruism and affective sensibility. The scholarity groups are diferentiated by interpersonal flexibility and altruism. Through this paper it´s possible to suggest that the studied variables are related to empathy, corroborating previous studies that point out cognitive variables follow together with development and must be affected by educational improvement.

Keywords : Empathy; Age; Scholarity level.

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