Despite broad agreement that understanding a personality construct requires integrating trait and state levels of analysis, few studies have explicitly attempted such an integration. The present study did this by examining the relationships between trait and state measures of empathy. State measures were taken daily, with a focus on the day level (within-person) covariation between empathy and daily mood and events. Twice a week for up to 10 weeks, 103 participants provided measures of their daily empathy and mood (NA and PA) and described the events that occurred each day. Multilevel random coefficient modeling analyses found that daily empathy covaried positively with the impact of daily positive and negative social events and with daily positive and negative affect. Empathy did not covary with achievement-related events. Analyses that simultaneously included empathy, mood, and events suggested that daily NA mediated relationships between daily empathy and daily negative social events. Although mean daily empathy was positively related to trait empathy, trait empathy did not moderate relationships between daily empathy and events nor between daily empathy and mood. Moreover, daily empathy did not covary with daily depressogenic thinking, need for cognition, nor self-esteem, suggesting that empathy is distinct from these constructs. Possible mechanisms linking social events and empathy, such as emotional contagion, are discussed. (A)
Samenvatting