Empathy and implicit theories of emotions and personality in a chinese sample

Background. Empathy is widely recognized as a multifaceted trait that includes cognitive and emotional components. The Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCEI) (Reniers et al., 2011) has been widely used in many countries. However, the question of its factor structure as applied to the Chinese samples was not resolved in two previous worksOur approbation allowed us to clarify its psychometric characteristics, which is important for its further application in China and in cross-cultural studies.

The problem of the relationship between the implicit theories (IT) of emotions and personality and empathy, which has not yet been investigated, is also relevant.

Objective. 1) re-adaptation of the QCEI questionnaire on a Chinese sample, 2) testing hypotheses about the connections of implicit theories of personality and the ability to control emotions with the cognitive and affective components of empathy (on a Chinese sample).

Design. 1,319 Chinese participants completed the QCEI questionnaire, of which 520 in person and 799 through online communication.Their data was randomly split into two samples. Exploratory factor analysis was carried out for the first sample, and confirmatory factor analysis was done for the second one.These 1319 people filled out the questionnaire of implicit theories of emotions (ITE). 520 participants filled out the questionnaire of implicit theories of personality (ITP) as well.To assess the convergent validity of our Chinese version of the QCAE questionnaire 799 participants also completed the M. Davis IRI empathy questionnaire.

Results. A four-factor QCAE model was established for the Chinese sample (as opposed to the author's five-factor model);IRI components are significantly positively correlated with QCAE components, which indicates the commonality of their nomological network.Based on the fact that the incrementality index for ITE is significantly and positively correlated with cognitive empathy, we accepted the hypothesis of the cognitive component as the leading one in the person's assumption about the possibility of controlling emotions.The ITP incrementality index positively correlates only with the “Adjustment” subscale, which indicates a lower representation of the cognitive component in ITP in the Chinese sample. It followsfrom our results that the hypothesis on the connection of the affective component of empathy with the IT of emotions and personality can be rejected.

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