Relationship between college students’ social nuisance behavior and their empathy by subject

Abstract

Most of the studies on social nuisance behaviors have included university students as subjects. Although studies have examined the factors associated with social nuisance behaviors, the relationship between social nuisance and empathy remains unexplored. This may be because of a failure to consider subject-specific empathy, such as with whom one can empathize and to what extent. Therefore, we created an empathy measure for each subject toward whom one empathizes, and investigated its associations with social nuisance behaviors. A survey of college students (n＝105) did not show whether the level of empathy toward people with low association level was correlated with social nuisance behaviors. Instead, low empathy for close people (in both cognitive and emotional domains) was found to be related to the ease of performing social nuisance behaviors. This suggests that it is more important to improve one’s ability to empathize with those close to oneself than to increase empathy for all people. The empathy scale used in this study needs to be validated in the future.