September 30, 2023
"Adolescents' compassion for others, from various perspectives, is posited to be shaped fundamentally by relational factors, such that receiving compassion from others can fulfill the need for relatedness, which in turn can promote compassion for others."
Main takeaways from this research are:
- There exists an indirect relationship between receiving and extending compassion
- Receiving compassion from others creates a sense of relatedness that allows one to feel connected with and cared for, thus encouraging them to extend compassion in return.
Compassion is a complex relational quality characterized by the feeling that arises when witnessing another's suffering that also motivates a desire to help alleviate the suffering. As needs for a sense of relatedness and social connection accelerate during adolescence, compassion emerges as an important social-emotional quality for building positive and supportive relationships.
In the developmental literature, research on positive social relationships in adolescence has focused primarily on broader qualities such as prosocial behavior, altruism, and empathy. Less research has specifically explored the development of compassion and whether social factors such as relatedness (i.e., the need to belong and feel connected) might shape adolescents' ability to both receive and extend compassion from others.
To better understand the developmental processes that may support compassion during adolescence, LRDC research scientist Dr. Brian Galla, along with his doctoral student Michael Tumminia and their colleagues at Pennsylvania State University, conducted a yearlong, three-wave longitudinal study.
The research team collected data from a sample of 599 high school students in western Pennsylvania. Students self-reported their perceptions of receiving compassion from others, a sense of relatedness, and extending compassion at the beginning, middle, and end of the school year.
The researchers found that "the association between adolescents' perceptions of receiving compassion and extending compassion was influenced through adolescents' increased sense of relatedness." In other words, adolescents who perceived to receive compassion were more likely to feel a sense of relatedness to others, and then extend compassion to others. While the researchers did not observe a direct relationship between adolescents' receipt of compassion with their extension of compassion, results also revealed a reciprocal relationship between adolescents' receiving of compassion and a sense of relatedness.
The results of this study pave the way for additional research into how adolescents experience, develop, and enact compassionate behavior. Read the full story published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.