In plain language
Empathy — the ability to understand and share another person's emotions — is often described as a key ingredient of good relationships. But does being empathic actually attract friends, and does it work the same way for teenage boys and girls? This study asked whether the link between empathy and friendship depends on sex: specifically, whether girls would choose empathic boys as close friends while boys would not do the same for empathic girls.
The researchers measured empathy, friendship social support, and close-friendship nominations in 1,970 Grade 10 students (993 boys, 977 girls; average age about 15.7 years) across 16 Australian schools. Because students nominated their actual close friends, the study could count how many friendship nominations each adolescent received and link that to their empathy levels using multilevel statistical models.
The results showed a striking asymmetry. Boys high in cognitive empathy attracted about 1.8 more friendship nominations from girls than boys low in empathy, whereas empathic girls attracted no more opposite-sex friends than other girls. Receiving more nominations made boys feel more supported by their friends, but had no effect on girls' felt support. Importantly, empathy predicted more supportive, higher-quality friendships for both boys and girls regardless of how many friends they had — suggesting empathy is a skill worth cultivating in all young people, even though its social payoffs differ by sex and context.
Key findings
- Girls actively chose empathic boys as close friends: each standard-unit increase in a boy's cognitive empathy earned him roughly one additional close-friendship nomination from a girl, and high-empathy boys attracted on average 1.8 more girl friendship nominations than low-empathy boys.
- Empathic girls did not attract a greater number of opposite-sex friends — the empathy-to-friendship effect was moderated by sex.
- The more friendship nominations a boy received (from boys or girls), the more supported he felt by his friends; the number of nominations girls received had no effect on their felt support.
- Regardless of the quantity of friends, empathy was linked to more supportive friendships for both males and females (standardized effects around .31–.33 for cognitive empathy and .16–.19 for affective empathy).
- The pattern of results was similar for both cognitive empathy (understanding others' emotions) and affective empathy (sharing others' emotions).
- Findings came from a large sample of 1,970 Grade 10 students in 16 schools, analysed with multilevel models of real friendship nominations rather than self-reported popularity.
How to cite
APA
Ciarrochi, J., Parker, P. D., Sahdra, B. K., Kashdan, T. B., Kiuru, N., & Conigrave, J. (2017). When empathy matters: The role of sex and empathy in close friendships. Journal of Personality, 85(4), 494–504. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12255
BibTeX
@article{ciarrochi2017when,
author = {Ciarrochi, Joseph and Parker, Philip D. and Sahdra, Baljinder K. and Kashdan, Todd B. and Kiuru, Noona and Conigrave, James},
title = {When empathy matters: The role of sex and empathy in close friendships},
journal = {Journal of Personality},
year = {2017},
volume = {85},
number = {4},
pages = {494--504},
doi = {10.1111/jopy.12255}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.