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Correlation Between Masculinity and Empathy Essay

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Correlation Between Masculinity and Empathy

Many psychological studies have been carried out over the years in the topic of personality, in aiming to grasp the type of factors that are involved in bestowing us the personalities that we hold. Most people will have probably come across various personality tests at some stage or another, which ask you lots of questions and then analyze your results in trying to categorize what kind of personality you've got.

One of the most fascinating aspects of personality is the issue of gender roles in our personalities. One would expect men generally have more masculine traits than feminine ones, and women tend to have more feminine traits than masculine ones. Sandra L. Bem (1974), a psychologist, …show more content…

Moreover, they stated that " ¡K¡K(empathy) should be directly associated with socially undesirable femininity/immature dependency and should be compensated by and thus inversely related to the socially desirable aspects of masculinity" (Watson, Biderman and Sawrie, 1994, p.706). Moreover, the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ) and the Mehrabian and Epstein empathy measure were administered and found a significant negative correlation between empathy, an expressive attribute, and masculinity. Hence, between masculinity and empathy, there ought to be a negative correlation (as cited by Foushee, Davis and Archer, 1979).

However, many debates questioned on the negative correlation between masculinity and empathy, an analyses from Schenk and Heinsch (1985) found no significant correlation between empathy and masculinity and femininity to males and females. A research from Karniol, Gabay, Ochion and Harari (1998) even presented positive correlation between masculinity and empathy.

In light of the above, the purpose of the current study was to illustrate the relationship between masculinity and empathy, by rehypothesizing that both variables develop a positive correlation between them.

Method

Participants

Participants are one hundred and forty eight undergraduate students enrolled in introductory psychology course for course credit at University of Western Ontario. The sample represents Canadian

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