Does living through hardship make you a more caring person? A study published in Scientific Reports suggests that experiencing childhood trauma could be linked to higher levels of empathy in adulthood.
Empathy is commonly thought of as the ability to understand and relate to the thoughts and feelings of others. An individual’s level of empathy can be affected by a myriad of factors, including identity, context, and life experiences. Many different life experiences have been studied in relation to empathy previously, such as experiencing social rejection, sexual assault, and even death of a pet.
An understudied variable that could be related to empathy is experiencing early life adversity. Early life adversities, such as abuse and neglect, have been shown to have significant effects on the brain and socio-emotional development of individuals. While early life adversity has been linked to negative outcomes, such as increased anxiety and depression, this study seeks to find out if it is linked to a positive outcome, specifically empathy.
In their study, Annika B. E. Benz and colleagues utilized 228 German-speaking adults who were recruited online. Participants completed measures online using Qualtrics, including demographic information, childhood adversity, parenting style, and empathy. To further assess empathy, participants were given the opportunity to donate a part of their compensation from completing the study to a charity that supports people suffering in Madagascar.
Results showed that experiencing any type of adversity during childhood, including emotional, physical, or sexual abuse and emotional or physical neglect, was associated with heightened personal distress when other people are suffering. Higher levels of maternal and paternal overprotection and lower levels of maternal and paternal care were also associated with heightened distress in response to other’s suffering.
Participants who suffered from sexual abuse in childhood showed higher levels of willingness to donate money to charity at the end of the study. Early life adversity was not related to other subscales of empathy, such as cognitive empathy.
These results suggest that childhood adversity may be related to certain aspects of empathy, such as personal distress, which could possibly be due to difficulty with emotional regulation that has been seen in other studies for survivors of childhood trauma.
This study took important steps into understanding if childhood adversity is related to empathy. Despite this, there are limitations to note. One such limitation is that all measures were self-report, which is vulnerable to bias.
Additionally, self-report on childhood abuse can be difficult due to repressed memories or inability to process a parent’s behavior as abuse. Lastly, the willingness to donate could be affected by a myriad of factors, such as socioeconomic status, and may not be a good way to assess empathy.
“The study presented here suggests that [early life adversity] may also be related to empathy, specifically the experience of personal distress,” the researchers concluded. “Thus, negative childhood memories are associated with having more feelings of personal distress when seeing others in distress.”
“While this may not be related to explicit positive outcomes, like increased prosocial behavior, and in fact may be related to increased depressive symptoms, it nonetheless reflects how negative experiences may be related to how individuals react and feel when seeing others in distress. Our human experience involves a constant barrage of emotional triggers, and while it is important to self-regulate one’s emotions to not become overwhelmed, it is also important to retain the ability to feel, and feel the pain of others.”
The study, “Increased empathic distress in adults is associated with higher levels of childhood maltreatment“, was authored by Annika B. E. Benz, Stephanie J. Dimitroff, Christin Jeggle, Raphaela J. Gaertner, Maria Meier, Eva Unternaehrer, Ulrike U. Bentele, Bernadette F. Denk, Elea S. C. Klink, and Jens C. Pruessner.