Analysis of Empathy and Family Relationships

Abstract

Empathy is the ability to understand other people’s feelings or put oneself in those specific situations. There are two types of empathy, cognitive and affective empathy, one is to understand, and the other one is to experience the emotional states, respectively. Based on a long-time study, family affects the development of children a lot, like how they organize their words to express their feelings influence the children to learn how to say their own feelings in childhood and even adolescence. How parents show warmth to kids and how they support their children may also affect children’s ability to show empathy. This may be because children know they can express their feelings to close friends, and boys may know empathy is not a feminine trait that they can also have. Children may act differently when they grow up, and they may show prosocial behaviors or antisocial behaviors depending on their levels of ability to show empathy. Besides the family affecting children’s development, mental problems like DBD specifically also play a role. DBD children’s emotional and feelings systems have some issues in that they cannot feel others’ feelings, which is not that they do not want to, but they cannot. Since they cannot “feel” others, they are more likely to have antisocial behaviors than ordinary people. In all, the family environment and even some mental issues affect the development of children.