The Contribution of Studying Psychology to Empathy and Psychological Distress: A Cross-sectional Analysis

This study explored the effect of gender, self-efficacy, motivation, psychological distress, and studying psychology on the level of empathy of university students in Lebanon. A total of 310 students and graduates participated in the survey through an online questionnaire through social media platforms using the Basic Empathy Scale (BES), the General Self Efficacy Scale (GSE), Academic Motivation Scale (AMS), and the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K-10), comparing first year and last year undergraduate psychology students to first year and last year non-psychology students. Correlations, Analyses of variance, and regression analyses were used to determine the predictors of empathy as well as compare the various groups on empathy and psychological distress. The results showed that psychology students have higher empathy from the onset and that this does not increase throughout the psychology education and that women have higher empathy than men and were found to be more intrinsically motivated to study psychology. Motivation for studying psychology had no effect on empathy gained. General self-efficacy was found to be positively correlated with cognitive empathy but negatively correlated with affective empathy. Higher psychological distress was associated with higher affective empathy but was not predictive of cognitive empathy. Finally, graduates were found to have significantly lower psychological distress than students regardless of major.