Adversity, Emotion Recognition, and Empathic Concern in High-risk Youth

Principal Investigator(s):  View help for Principal Investigator(s) Jodi Quas, University of California-Irvine; Kelli Dickerson, University of California-Irvine; Richard Matthew, University of California-Irvine; Connor Harron, University of California-Irvine; Catherine Quas, Bluefish Dental

Version:  View help for Version V1

Name File Type Size Last Modified
Quas-et-al.-Codebook.docx application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document 193.8 KB 07/09/2017 07:20:PM
Quas-et-al.-Swazi-data.sav application/x-spss-sav 162.7 KB 07/09/2017 05:27:PM

Project Citation: 

Quas, Jodi, Dickerson, Kelli, Matthew, Richard, Harron, Connor, and Quas, Catherine. Adversity, Emotion Recognition, and Empathic Concern in High-risk Youth . Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2017-07-09. https://doi.org/10.3886/E100812V1

Project Description

Summary:  View help for Summary Little is known about how emotion recognition and empathy jointly operate in youth growing up in contexts defined by persistent adversity. We investigated whether adversity exposure in two groups of youth was associated with reduced empathy and whether deficits in emotion recognition mediated this association. Foster, rural poor, and comparison youth from Swaziland, Africa identified emotional expressions and rated their empathic concern for characters depicted in images showing positive, ambiguous, and negative scenes.  Rural and foster youth perceived greater anger and happiness in the main characters in ambiguous and negative images than did comparison youth.  Rural children also perceived less sadness. Youth’s perceptions of sadness in the negative and ambiguous expressions mediated the relation between adversity and empathic concern, but only for the rural youth, who perceived less sadness, which then predicted less empathy. Findings provide new insight into processes that underlie empathic tendencies in adversity-exposed youth and highlight potential directions for interventions to increase empathy.  
Funding Sources:  View help for Funding Sources American Psychological Foundation

Scope of Project

Subject Terms:  View help for Subject Terms emotion recognition; empathy; high-risk youth
Geographic Coverage:  View help for Geographic Coverage Swaziland
Collection Date(s):  View help for Collection Date(s) 8/12/2014 – 8/28/2014
Data Type(s):  View help for Data Type(s) survey data


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V1 [2017-07-09]

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