Assessing parental empathy: a role for empathy in child attachment

Although empathy has been associated with helping behavior and relationship quality, little research has evaluated the role of parental empathy in the development of parent-child relationships. The current study (1) establishes preliminary validity of the Parental Affective and Cognitive Empathy Scale (PACES), a method for coding empathy from parents' narrative responses to the Parent Development Interview - Revised for School-Aged Children (PDI-R-SC), and (2) tests a theoretical model of empathy and attachment. Sixty caregivers and their children completed a battery of questionnaire and interview measures, including the PDI-R-SC and the Child Attachment Interview (CAI). Caregivers' interview narratives were scored for empathy using PACES. PACES showed good interrater reliability and good convergent validity with a self-report empathy measure. Parent empathy was positively related to child attachment security (using a continuous score for narrative coherence) and emotional openness on the CAI, as well as to child perceptions of parental warmth. Moreover, parent empathy mediated the relation between parents' self-reported attachment style and their children's attachment security. Implications for attachment theory and future directions for establishing scale validity are discussed.