Nasci primeiro, sou mais empático?

Abstract

Empathy is a socio-emotional skill that begins to be developed in childhood. Given this, family relationships are present from an early age, contributing to the development and learning of individuals also regarding this skill. Thus, only children, first-born children and their siblings develop their levels of empathy, according to their family experience. Therefore, birth order and sex may be factors that influence empathy levels, and our objective was to verify the effect of these factors. The research was carried out with 147 participants, including children aged 5 to 10 years, with collections carried out in schools (private and municipal) and in the Human Behavior Evolution Laboratory (LECH/UFRN). There were no significant differences in any of the hypotheses tested, that is, empathy levels were similar among children regardless of sex or birth order. One factor that we understand as a possible limitation in our work is the small age range of the participants, which may have influenced our results, because the age of the siblings (when they were present) was very close to that of the first-born children, not considering different stages of the development. From our results, we conclude that empathy is not linked to individuals' birth order or sex.