Parental and Peer Attachment and Its Relationship with ‎Emotional Empathy ‎

Abstract

This study aimed at revealing the level of parental and peer attachment and its relationship to emotional empathy. The study sample was selected by using the stratified random sampling method to include (302) male and female students of 11^th  school graders, The study used Armsden and Greenberg's Parent-Peer Attachment scale, and Carsuso and Mayer’s emotional empathy scale. The results indicated an intermediate degree of parental and peer attachment, while the image of the peers was highly perceived. The results also showed an intermediate degree of emotional empathy at the macro level; however, emotional empathy ranked high when related to feeling of others’ suffering. The results also revealed a statistically significant and positive relationship between parenal and peer attachment and emotional empathy. At the micro  level, the relationship between emotional empathy of feeling with others’ suffering and the image of peers was the strongest; however, the relationship between  emotional response to the father’s image was the least. Finally, the results demonstrated the ability of the study model to predict the level of emotional empathy through parenal and peers attachment, where the most likely factor to predict emotional empathy is the mother’s image, followed by the image of peers and finally the father’s image.