Empathy, aggression and social intelligence among teachers: A Correlational study

Abstract

Teachers are perhaps the most essential building block of society, responsible for nurturing the youth and creating the nation’s future. The present study aimed to explore three important factors of the human psyche, i.e. empathy, aggression and social intelligence in teachers and to investigate the relationships between them. For this purpose, a sample of 212 teachers (106 university teachers and 106 school-college teachers) were selected from semi-government educational institutions in the Islamabad and Rawalpindi region. It was hypothesized that the social intelligence factors of manipulation and social irritability would be negatively related with empathy while positively related to aggression and its factors. Also, a negative relationship was predicted between empathy and aggression. It was also hypothesized there would be differences between the variables for the gender groups and for the institution types. For the assessment of empathy the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (2009) was used, for aggression the Indirect-Direct Aggression Questionnaire (2013) and for social intelligence Manipulation, Empathy and Social Irritability (2014) was used. The results revealed significant negative relationships between empathy and aggression as well as empathy and manipulation plus social irritability. It was also revealed that manipulation and social irritability are significantly positively correlated with aggression. A positive relationship between empathy as a separate construct and empathy as a part of social intelligence was also found. The findings also reported no significant differences between the two genders nor between the university and school-college teachers. The results of the study have important implications for the field of educational psychology and research and lights the way towards future researches exploring these findings. Teacher training programs for affective training are also recommended.