Couple empathy – the mediator of attachment styles for partners adjusting to parenthood

Abstract

Objective and Background: Attachment styles and empathy with respect to couples’ functioning during the period of transition to parenthood have rarely been studied. The aim of the present study was to examine the link between attachment security and perceived empathy as well as their role in the adjustment to parenthood. It was hypothesised that secure parents, as opposed to insecure ones, would perceive themselves and their partners as more empathic after the child’s birth and, as a consequence, more effectively adapt to parenthood. Methods: Sixty-seven couples experiencing their first transition to parenthood participated in the study. Their attachment styles were measured before the birth of the child. Empathy (as perceived in oneself and in a partner) and adjustment to parenthood were measured when the child was a few months old. Results: The results indicated that new parents with more secure, less anxious–ambivalent, and less avoidant attachment styles expressed and perceived more empathy in their relationships, and they were better adjusted to parenthood. A partner’s perceived empathy was found to be a mediator between one’s attachment styles and their adjustment to parenthood. In particular, men’s self-assessed empathy and men’s empathy as perceived by their wives was a significant mediator of the relationship between one’s attachment styles and adjustment to parenthood. Conclusion: Attachment styles are associated with the empathy of partners (both declared and perceived), which in turn predicts their better adjustment to parenthood.

Keywords:

• attachment
• empathy
• parenthood
• couple

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Dr. Jacki Fitzpatrick from Texas Tech University for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Notes

1. The terms ‘empathy’ and ‘empathic concern’ are used to describe the same construct.

2. The scale consists of nine instead of eight adjectives taken from the Gough Adjective Check List (ACL; Gough, & Heilbrun, 1965) because the adjective ‘warm’ had two semantically and psychologically close counterparts in the Polish version of ACL, as stated by three trained psychologists who took part in the adaptation of this measure.

3. Due to the non-normal distribution, the data were nonlinearly transformed to achieve normality. Therefore, it was possible to estimate models using parametric estimators and maximum likelihood estimation.