Generational And Sex Differences In Relation To Empathy Among Pre-Graduate Teachers

Insufficient attention is paid to the issue of empathy in the context of undergraduate teacher training. Nevertheless, empathy is one of the important skills that facilitates and deepens interpersonal relationships and strengthens interpersonal interactions. Empathy as a psychological construct consists of an affective (feeling an adequate emotion triggered by the emotions of others), cognitive (the ability to understand or predict what the other person might think, feel, do) and a mixed component (cognitive and affective). In this paper the authors focused on the differences in the degree of empathy based on various generations (X, Y, and Z generations) and sex. The data were obtained by means of the Empathy Quotient (EQ) approach on a sample of 313 pre-service teachers. The sample comprises 115 men and 196 women. The X generation was represented by 67, the Y generation by 104, and the Z generation by 140 students of teaching professions. The ANOVA test (using Welch’s correction) suggested that the level of empathy differed significantly in each age group of respondents, F (2, 177.048) = 99.131, p .001. A post-hoc analysis (Games-Howell) confirmed significant differences among all groups (p .001) with a gradually increasing degree of empathy. An independent t test suggested that the degree of empathy varied considerably across the groups of respondents by sex; women had significantly higher empathy scores than men, t (309 = -9.524, p .001).