Caregiver Maltreatment Subtypes and Timing: Differential Influences on Emerging Adulthood Empathy

Purpose: Interpersonal interactions shape empathy throughout development. Detrimental interactions, including maltreatment, create risk for the development of aberrant levels of empathy. However, subtypes of abuse and neglect, as well as age of exposure, complicate these relations. The current study elucidates contributions of maltreatment subtypes and age of exposure on state and trait empathy. Methods: Emerging adults (N=94, M age=19.12 years, 45.7% male) from a large public university self-reported their age of exposure to three maltreatment categories: physical threat, nonphysical threat, and deprivation. Participants completed a vignette measure of state empathy and self-reported their trait empathy. State and trait empathy were regressed onto each maltreatment subtype. Relative weights analyses assessed the importance of maltreatment timing in predicting empathy. Results: Results revealed that as deprivation increased, state (β=-.24, t(90)=-2.37, p=.02) and trait empathy decreased (β= -.29, t(92)=-2.91, p<.01). As physical threat increased, trait empathy also increased (β=.23, t(92)=2.36, p=.02). Adolescent (versus childhood) exposure to deprivation had a significantly larger impact on state empathy (β=.074 versus β=.027). Conclusions: Findings underscore the idea that state and trait empathy have different associations with maltreatment depending upon its type and timing of occurrence. These results might help explain previous disparate results and suggest important distinctions for future work.