SynthesisInternational journal of environmental research and public health2022
The Relationship between Empathy and Attachment in Children and Adolescents: Three-Level Meta-Analyses.
Synthesis in International journal of environmental research and public health, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 32 citations in OpenAlex.
- Impact VR: Building Socioemotional Resilience in Youth with Conduct Disorder.Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research · 2026Trial
- Intersections Among Attachment, Empathy and Emotion Regulation in Middle Childhood.International journal of psychology : Journal international de psychologie · 2026Article
- Developing kind emotions in caring environments.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- The effect of emotion recognition and empathy training on children's empathic tendencies and social acceptance of peers with special needs: a pretest-posttest controlled experimental study.Irish journal of medical science · 2025Article
- Change in empathic disequilibrium across childhood and associations with socioemotional difficulties.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2025Article
- Securely stressed: association between attachment and empathic stress in romantic couples.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Understanding the connection: attachment patterns and interpersonal competence in nursing undergraduates.BMC nursing · 2025Article
- Ins and Outs of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) Intervention in Promoting Social Communicative Abilities and Theory of Mind in Children and Adolescents with ASD: A Systematic Review.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- The Moderating Effect of Peer Attachment on Associations Between Children's and Adolescents' Cyberbullying Victimization, Bystanding, and Depressive Symptoms.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2024Article
- Pet attachment and prosocial attitude toward humans: the mediating role of empathy to animals.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- How empathy, perceived parental care, and overprotection indexes are affected by participants' sex: investigating cultural differences.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2023Article
- Four attachment-based categories of emotion regulation in adolescent psychic troubles.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Article
- Attachment Insecurity and Altruistic Behavior among Chinese Adolescents: Mediating Effect of Different Dimensions of Empathy.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Empathy is one of the leading social abilities to understand or feel the emotions of other people. Attachment is thought to be a critical influential factor of empathy, as revealed by attachment theory and experimental studies, while empathy is also believed to facilitate the quality of attachment. Although many studies are conducted concerning the two subjects, the direction and magnitude of their relationship still remain unclear. In order to clarify the discrepant results in the previous study and explore the moderators in the empathy-attachment association, three-level meta-analyses were conducted in the present work. Based on 212 effect sizes from 59 samples in 50 studies with a total of 24,572 participants, random effect model analyses showed that empathy was insignificantly correlated with anxious attachment, significantly negatively correlated with avoidant attachment, and significantly positively correlated with secure attachment. The meta-analytic results indicated that children and adolescents with high secure attachment tend to show more empathy than those with low secure attachment. The meta-regression model revealed significant effects of the empathy dimension, culture, empathy measurement tools, and publication state. Additionally, implications and future directions for the empathy-attachment relationship were also discussed.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.