ABSTRACT
Prejudices can lead to discrimination, social exclusion, and violence particularly among young male adults. Previous findings suggest that the degree of holding prejudices is linked to low levels of empathy, while low levels of empathy have been associated with alexithymia, the inability to experience one's own feelings. We tested the hypothesis that the impact of a lack of empathy on reporting blatant and subtle prejudices is moderated by the inability to identify one's own feelings. In a sample of n = 136 young male adults aged 21 years (mean = 21.5 years; sd = 0.3), we conducted correlation and moderator analyses to determine possible relationships between prejudices, empathy, and alexithymia as assessed by self-report questionnaires. Prejudices were assessed by the Blatant and Subtle Prejudice Scale (BSPS), empathy was assessed by the German modified version of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), and alexithymia by the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). Self-reported empathy levels were correlated with the strength of subtle and blatant prejudices. The moderation analyses revealed that the negative association between empathy and subtle prejudice increased with decreasing alexithymia. The negative association between empathy and blatant prejudice, on the other hand, was significant only for participants with low levels of alexithymia. These results suggest that empathy can limit the expression of blatant and to some degree also subtle prejudice when subjects are capable to identify their own feelings in a group of young males.
Subject(s)
Emotions , Empathy , Adult , Affective Symptoms , Humans , Male , Prejudice , Surveys and Questionnaires , Young AdultABSTRACT
En el campo de la filosofía, algunos teóricos han mostrado la importancia que tienen las emociones en la promoción de acciones orientadas al bien común. En oposición a estos presupuestos, encontramos el paradigma del mal, del cual se derivan reflexiones teóricas acerca del lugar de las emociones como activadoras de la crueldad. Se destaca el valor otorgado a la infancia en el aprendizaje de las emociones, pero también la afectación de hechos atroces en su sensibilidad (su no lugar) Este artículo busca hacer una revisión de diferentes tesis comprensivas acerca de las emociones, su cultivo desde la infancia y su efecto en contextos atroces (paradigma del mal).
In the field of moral and política! philosophy, in particular, in the liberal political tradition, some theorists have shown the importance of emotions in the promotion of actions oriented towards the common good. In opposition to these presuppositions, there is the paradigm of evil, which reflects on the place of emotions as the activators of cruelty in the midst of barbaric contexts -fear, guilt, disgust-. It should be noted that theses domains have given a significant value to the role of childhood in the learning of civic emotions, even if they have also underlined the harm caused to moral and political sensibility by atrocious events -the (no) place of childhood-. Taking this literature into account, the present article aims to review the different comprehensive thesis about emotions in the moral and the political life, their cultivation since childhood, and their impact on contexts affected by horrorism and atrocity (paradigm of evil).