The Association Empathy has with Depressive Symptoms, Resilience, and Posttraumatic Growth

Empathy explains one’s ability to understand and feel the emotional experiences of another person. Because it helps relating to others, typically people assume empathy is a good quality to have; however, this may be debatable. The current study investigates the relationships empathy may have with the varying ways individual adjust or react psychologically following highly stressful life experiences, namely depressive symptoms, resiliency, and posttraumatic growth. College students ( N  = 403) participated in an online study and completed a series of scales assessing these variables. Results of hierarchical regression analyses revealed that, after controlling for confounding variables, empathy was not associated with resiliency, but was positively associated with both posttraumatic growth and depressive symptoms. The results highlight the double-edged sword effect of empathy, such that being empathic toward others could increase depressive feelings while also increasing a sense of personal growth, and yet, it may not contribute to the perceived ability to bounce back or recover after adversity. Future research should elucidate the independence between resilience and empathy, and investigate ways to prevent highly empathetic individuals from experiencing depressive effects, in addition to assisting them to grow, as a certain level of depressive symptomatology may indicate healthy adaptation after experiencing trauma.