How Childhood Adversity Can Increase One’s Empathy for Others
Does enduring hardship make you a more compassionate person? A study published in Scientific Reports suggests that experiencing childhood trauma might be linked to higher levels of empathy in adulthood.
Empathy is typically understood as the ability to comprehend and connect with the thoughts and emotions of others. Various factors can influence an individual’s empathy, including identity, context, and life experiences. Previous research has explored how different life experiences, such as social rejection, sexual assault, and the death of a pet, relate to empathy.
An understudied factor potentially related to empathy is early life adversity. Early adversities like abuse and neglect significantly impact brain development and socio-emotional growth. While such adversities are often linked to negative outcomes like increased anxiety and depression, this study investigates whether they might also be linked to positive outcomes, specifically empathy.
Annika B. E. Benz and colleagues conducted the study with 228 German-speaking adults recruited online. Participants provided demographic information and completed surveys on childhood adversity, parenting style, and empathy via Qualtrics. To further measure empathy, participants had the option to donate part of their study compensation to a charity supporting people in Madagascar.
The results showed that experiencing any form of childhood adversity, including emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, and emotional or physical neglect, was associated with heightened personal distress when witnessing others’ suffering. Additionally, higher levels of overprotective parenting and lower levels of maternal and paternal care correlated with increased distress in response to others’ suffering.
Participants who endured sexual abuse in childhood exhibited a greater willingness to donate to charity at the study’s end. However, early life adversity was not linked to other aspects of empathy, such as cognitive empathy.
These findings suggest that childhood adversity may be related to certain aspects of empathy, particularly personal distress, which might stem from the emotional regulation difficulties observed in other studies of childhood trauma survivors.
The study contributes to understanding the relationship between childhood adversity and empathy but has limitations. One limitation is the reliance on self-report measures, which can be biased. Additionally, recalling childhood abuse can be challenging due to repressed memories or difficulty recognizing parental behavior as abusive. Lastly, factors like socioeconomic status may influence the willingness to donate, complicating its use as an empathy measure.
“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 more personal distress when seeing others in distress.”
“While this may not correlate with explicit positive outcomes, like increased prosocial behavior, and may relate to higher depressive symptoms, it nonetheless reflects how negative experiences influence reactions to others’ distress. Our human experience involves constant emotional triggers. While self-regulation is crucial to avoid being overwhelmed, it is also essential to retain the capacity to feel and empathize with others’ pain.”
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.
