Presence of Different Levels of Empathy and Sympathy in Two Groups of Adolescents from Different Socioeconomic Strata

Abstract

Social emotions like empathy and sympathy are essential tools to help navigate group-oriented and interdependent life structures. These emotions help to regulate group-related behaviour. This exchange is a bilateral process, where it is not just our emotions regulating our social surroundings but our social surroundings also play an essential role in influencing various aspects of emotions. Individuals are a total sum of self and social, all psychological constructs that manifest as an individual will also have a significant influence on both self and society. This study is done by taking unit constructs of both, social (SES socio-economic status) and psychological constructs (social-emotional state: empathy and sympathy). Empathy and sympathy are most often used interchangeably with subtle but prominent differences. This paper tries to maintain the difference and work along the line of those differences to conclude. Available literature suggests that different level of SES influences the extent of empathy and sympathy one possesses. In a population size of 200 adolescents of the age range 12-19 years, n=100 was taken from low SES and n=100 was taken from high SES. The variation in empathy and sympathy levels of the two groups was seen to be significant. The low SES group was found to have high empathy and low sympathy, whereas the high SES had low empathy and high sympathy.