Components of Empathy in Children: Factor Structure of the Empathy Quotient for Children (EQ-C).
Rebecca Smees, Louisa J Rinaldi, Julia Simner
PMID 39786532WHAT IT FOUND
A single empathy score can hide different problems.
The child empathy questionnaire split into social understanding, emotional empathy, negative interactions and antisocial behaviour. Children with special educational needs showed lower empathy across these domains.
Key findings
01The EQ-C can be divided into social-cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, negative interactions and antisocial behaviours.
02Children with a SEND status showed poorer empathy than comparison children across all four empathy domains.
03Higher sensory sensitivity was associated with lower social-cognitive empathy and more negative interactions.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
The factor analysis was exploratory, and the authors did not test the models with confirmatory factor analysis. Empathy and sensory sensitivity were reported by parents, not by the children themselves. The SEND group was small and mixed: 45 children had a SEND status, 624 did not, and the type of need was not collected. The study did not collect autism diagnosis or compare diagnosed autistic children with a comparison group. The emotional empathy association with sensory sensitivity was extremely small, and its direction changed when all empathy domains were analysed together. The EQ-C is a short questionnaire, so it may not capture all possible empathy domains.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that sensory sensitivities cause empathy problems. The study reports associations between parent-reported empathy domains and sensory sensitivity scores, and it did not test any treatment.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →