A Study Of The Relationship Among Adult Attachment,Emotional Experience And Empathy In University Students

Objectives.Empathic ability refers to the ability of an individual to recognize the emotion of the communicative object,understand the corresponding emotional reaction and experience of the other party,and accurately feedback the understood emotional content information to the other party.Empathy occurs in the process of human interaction,so adult attachment patterns are closely related to empathy.At the same time,empathy itself is a process of recognizing,understanding and responding to the emotions of others,which is based on the diversity and differentiation of the individual’s own emotional experience,namely the complexity of emotional experience(Emotional complexity).Previous studies have found that the emotional experience plays a partial mediating role both in the relationships between attachment-related avoidance/ anxiety and empathy.However,empathy can be divided into cognitive empathy and emotional empathy.Attachment-related avoidance and attachment-related anxiety have different effects on these two kinds of empathy,and some studies have found that emotional experience is cognitively oriented in this process.Therefore,on the basis of previous theories and researches,this study further explored the relationship among empathy ability,adult attachment and emotional experience of college students by adopting self-report and behavior measurement.Methods.Study 1 used the Interpersonal Reactivity Index-C(IRI),the Adult Attachment Scale(AAS),and the Range and Differentiation of Emotional Experience Scale(RDEES)to measure the empathy ability,adult attachment style,and emotional experience of 320 university students in Shanghai.In order to analyze the relationship among the three variables.In study 2,101 university students were conveniently sampled from 320 subjects in study 1 to complete the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test(RMET),through the behavioral measurement to further explore the relationship among empathy ability(the RMET’s score),adult attachment and emotional experience.Result.(1)There was a significant negative correlation between cognitive empathy and attachment-related avoidance(r=-0.18,p 0.01).Emotional empathy was significantly positively correlated with attachment-related anxiety(r=0.14,p 0.05).(2)There was a significant positive correlation between cognitive empathy and emotional experience(r=0.29,p 0.001).But the correlation between emotional empathy and emotional experience was not significant.And there was a significant positive correlation between the RMET’s score and the range of emotional experience(r=0.20,p 0.05).(3)There was a significant negative correlation between attachment-related avoidance and the range of emotional experience(r=-0.18,p 0.01).There was a significant negative correlation between attachment-related anxiety and the range of emotional experience(r=-0.16,p 0.01).(4)The range of emotional experience played a partial mediating role in the relationship between attachment-related avoidance and cognitive empathy and accounting for 22.62% of the total effect.Conclusion.This study found that the two dimensions of adult attachment avoidance and anxiety respectively affect the cognitive and emotional dimensions of empathy ability,suggesting that the relationship between the two may be divided into the top-down cognitive regulation process(attachment-related avoidance and cognitive empathy)and the bottom-up emotional processing process(attachment-related anxiety and emotional empathy).Moreover,emotional experience mainly acts on the cognitive level of empathy.The larger range of different emotions experienced could help people recognize the emotions of others.Finally,The range of emotional experience played a partial mediating role in the relationship between attachment-related avoidance and cognitive empathy,it shows that there are still other influencing factors in the relationship between adult attachment and empathy ability.