Exploring the links between childhood emotional abuse and empathy: The mediating roles of alexithymia and sensory processing sensitivity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Exposure to childhood emotional abuse amplifies the personality traits of alexithymia and sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) and impacts empathy. This study investigated if alexithymia, SPS positive traits, and/or SPS negative traits mediate the relationship between childhood emotional abuse and both emotional contagion measured behaviourally and self-reported empathy. A sample of 190 university students ( M age = 19.92 years) completed self-report measures of empathy and a behavioural task measuring emotional contagion elicited by viewing affective films. Multiple parallel mediation analyses were run to determine if the personality variables mediated the links between abuse and empathy-related outcome measures. The relationship between childhood emotional abuse and each of the self-report empathy subscales was mediated by personality, although the strength and direction of the effects varied across the three trait clusters. In the behavioural task, aspects of SPS mediated the relationships between emotional abuse and the strength of the primary emotion felt during viewing of positive and negative films; and alexithymia mediated the relationship between emotional abuse and the number of discrete emotions felt during viewing of negative films. The findings provide important insights into how childhood exposure to emotional abuse can impact personality development and, indirectly, the development of empathy. They also highlight the importance of considering the relative strength of specific traits associated with both alexithymia and SPS when trying to predict individual differences in empathy. The results may inform the development of individualized intervention programs targeting empathic deficits. • Past work has linked emotional abuse in childhood to problems related to empathy • We found that alexithymia and sensory processing sensitivity mediate this link • Exposure to emotional abuse predicted stronger expression of both traits • Both traits predicted emotional contagion and self-reported empathic processes • The findings may inform how we individualize treatments for empathy deficits
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".