Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA.
Dev Psychol. 2011 Nov;47(6):1792-803. doi: 10.1037/a0025309. Epub 2011 Sep 5.
The current research considered the costs of caring in youths' friendships. The development of a new construct, empathetic distress, allowed for a direct test of the commonly held belief that females suffer greater vicarious distress in response to close others' stressors and problems than do males. Empathetic distress refers to one's strongly sharing a relationship partner's distress over problems to the point of taking on the partner's distress and experiencing it as one's own. This new construct was examined in an ethnically diverse sample of early adolescents who responded to a series of questionnaires in their classrooms. Results indicated that girls did experience greater empathetic distress in friendships than did boys. In addition, the current research revealed that social perspective taking in friendships (i.e., the social-cognitive ability to infer and understand the friend's perspective) had adjustment trade-offs in that it predicted greater positive friendship quality but also greater empathetic distress in the friendship. Interestingly, the associations of social perspective taking with both positive friendship quality and empathetic distress were partially mediated by co-rumination or excessive discussion of problems. Applied implications of the findings that girls' greater social perspective taking and associated co-rumination contributed both to their greater positive friendship quality but also to greater costs of caring in the form of empathetic distress are discussed.
当前的研究关注了青少年友谊中关爱的成本。新的同理心痛苦概念的发展允许直接检验一种普遍观点，即女性对亲密他人的压力和问题的替代性痛苦比男性更大。同理心痛苦是指一个人强烈地与伴侣分享伴侣因问题而产生的痛苦，以至于将伴侣的痛苦视为自己的痛苦。这项新的研究在一个种族多样的早期青少年样本中进行，他们在课堂上对一系列问卷做出了回应。结果表明，女孩在友谊中确实比男孩经历更大的同理心痛苦。此外，目前的研究还表明，友谊中的社会观点采择（即推断和理解朋友观点的社会认知能力）存在调整权衡，因为它预测了更积极的友谊质量，但也预测了友谊中更大的同理心痛苦。有趣的是，社会观点采择与积极的友谊质量和同理心痛苦的关联部分通过共同思考或过度讨论问题而得到中介。研究结果表明，女孩的社会观点采择和相关的共同思考既有助于她们获得更好的友谊质量，也增加了关爱的代价，以同理心痛苦的形式表现出来，对此进行了讨论。
