The role of empathy in the development of social competence: a study of German school leavers

ABSTRACT The present study investigates how the components of social competence relate to the core components of empathy. It offers a systematic analysis of the effects of the independent variables – emotion recognition accuracy, emotional perspective taking and affective responsiveness – on the dependent variables – action evaluation, consequence anticipation, goal attainment and competence expectations. The study′s population, which was subjected to cross-sectional analysis, constisted of 130 mainstream school leavers. Structural Equation Modelling yielded a specified model which showed that the factors of evaluation of actions and anticipation of consequences were most strongly impacted by the level of emotional perspective taking. In addition, the empathy components were found to be positively correlated variables. The findings are discussed in the light of current work on social information processing, and their relevance to educational practice is explored