Assessment of empathy in educational field and its relationship with emotional intelligence

Empathy is a vicarious process that allows one to understand and feel others' thoughts and emotions. There are currently no Basque-language self-report instruments that provide valid, reliable measurements of this construct. Thus, the first aim of the present study was to adapt the Cognitive and Affective Empathy Scale (TECA) to the Basque culture and to validate it for children, adolescents and youth. The second aim was to analyze the relationships of empathy with emotional intelligence, gender and age. The sample comprised 504 participants (273 females and 231 males) between 10 and 18 years of age attending schools in the Basque Country. They all filled in the Cognitive and Affective Empathy Scale, the Empathy Index for Children and Adolescents and the short version of the Trait Meta-Mood Scale for adolescents. The Basque TECA was subjected to confirmatory factor analysis, and the results corroborated the four-factor structure of the original scale. These dimensions showed acceptable indices of internal consistency. The scale also showed some evidence of convergent validity. Medium-sized correlations were observed between dimensions of empathy and emotional intelligence. Nevertheless, no differences were found in empathy according to age. Finally, females displayed a higher level of empathy than males. The results of the study allow us to conclude that the Basque TECA is a useful instrument for assessing empathy in children, adolescents and youth in the educational context. Moreover, the relationship observed between empathy and emotional intelligence suggests that persons who pay attention to their emotions apply this skill to the interpersonal field.