Sources of Ethnocultural empathy: personality, intergroup relations, affects

Abstract

Individual and cultural factors play an important role in the emotional-social development. Culture creates differences in individuals' cognitions, emotions and behaviors about events. One of the differences within culture is ethnic-racial differences. This study was generally aimed that personality traits, intergroup relations, empathy-prosocial behavior-morality and affects are the predictive power to ethnocultural empathy. This article includes four studies. Participants are students the Education Faculty of a university in the Aegean Region. Participans took demograph sheet, HEXACO, narcissistic personality and universality-diversity orientation scales in sudy-1, demongraph sheet, right-wing authoritarianism, discrimination, sensitivity to different cultural groups, social distance and social dominance orientation scales in study 2, demographic sheet, basic empathy, pro-social behavior and morality in study 3 and demographic sheet, trait anger, positive-negative affects towards outgroups and threat perception in study 4. Hierarchic regression analysis reveal that ethnicity and universality-diversity orientation predicts the etnocultural empathy in study1. Immigrant discrimination predicts the ethocultural empathy in study 2. Ethnicity, political tendency, basic empathy and pro- social behavior predicts the ethnocultural empathy in study 3. General threat perceptions towards outgroups predicts the ethnocultural empathy. A result of four studies has showed that the total variance of ethnocultural empathy was explained as .924%. The findings provide support for the best predictive variables of etnocultural empaty was been UDO, low immigrant discrimination, empathy-prosocial behavior, threat perception to out groups and ethnicity-religion-politic variable. According to the results of four studies from the same faculty, these variables explain the majority of the variance related to etnocultural empathy. Ethnocultural empathy may be an important effect in increasing intergroup contact and reducing conflicts and discriminatory attitudes in preservice teachers.