Parental attitudes and adolescent empathy in a rural sociocultural context in Türkiye
- 1Karşıyaka Girls’ Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School, Central District, Bingöl, Türkiye
- 2Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Atlas University, Istanbul, Türkiye
- 3Acibadem Fulya Hospital, Istanbul, Türkiye
Abstract
Background: Adolescence is a critical period for the consolidation of identity and socio-emotional skills such as empathy, and parenting attitudes represent influential contextual factors. Most evidence on this relationship derives from Western samples, and it remains unclear whether the associations reported there hold in traditional family systems. This study examined the relationship between perceived parental attitudes and empathy among adolescents in a rural sociocultural context in Türkiye.
Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 458 high school students aged 14–18 in Bingöl completed the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ), the Parental Attitude Scale (PAS) and a sociodemographic form. Data were collected in two single-sex schools authorized by the provincial education directorate. Analyses comprised t-tests, one-way ANOVA with effect sizes, Pearson correlations and hierarchical multiple regression. The Benjamini–Hochberg procedure was applied to control the false discovery rate across group comparisons.
Results: Authoritarian parenting was negatively associated with empathy both bivariately (r = −0.162) and after adjustment for demographic characteristics and the remaining parenting dimensions (β = −0.170, p = 0.002). Protective/demanding parenting showed a small positive association that emerged more clearly under adjustment (β = 0.131, p = 0.006), whereas democratic parenting was not associated with empathy (β = −0.026, p = 0.648). A smaller number of siblings was associated with higher empathy. The model explained 12.5% of the variance (adjusted R2 = 0.113). Notably, the democratic and authoritarian subscales were themselves moderately positively correlated (r = 0.586).
Conclusion: In this context, the controlling dimension of parenting carried the association with empathy while the warmth dimension did not, and the two dimensions were not opposed to one another. These findings support attention to authoritarian control in family-based approaches to adolescent socio-emotional development, and indicate that the cross-cultural applicability of classical parenting typologies warrants direct examination rather than assumption.
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BibTeX
@article{barac2026parental,
title = {{Parental attitudes and adolescent empathy in a rural sociocultural context in Türkiye}},
author = {Selma Baraç and Talat Sarikavak},
journal = {Frontiers in Psychology},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1944408},
url = {https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1944408},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Parental attitudes and adolescent empathy in a rural sociocultural context in Türkiye
AU - Selma Baraç
AU - Talat Sarikavak
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/22
JO - Frontiers in Psychology
DO - 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1944408
UR - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1944408
AB - Background: Adolescence is a critical period for the consolidation of identity and socio-emotional skills such as empathy, and parenting attitudes represent influential contextual factors. Most evidence on this relationship derives from Western samples, and it remains unclear whether the associations reported there hold in traditional family systems. This study examined the relationship between perceived parental attitudes and empathy among adolescents in a rural sociocultural context in Türkiye. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 458 high school students aged 14–18 in Bingöl completed the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ), the Parental Attitude Scale (PAS) and a sociodemographic form. Data were collected in two single-sex schools authorized by the provincial education directorate. Analyses comprised t-tests, one-way ANOVA with effect sizes, Pearson correlations and hierarchical multiple regression. The Benjamini–Hochberg procedure was applied to control the false discovery rate across group comparisons. Results: Authoritarian parenting was negatively associated with empathy both bivariately (r = −0.162) and after adjustment for demographic characteristics and the remaining parenting dimensions (β = −0.170, p = 0.002). Protective/demanding parenting showed a small positive association that emerged more clearly under adjustment (β = 0.131, p = 0.006), whereas democratic parenting was not associated with empathy (β = −0.026, p = 0.648). A smaller number of siblings was associated with higher empathy. The model explained 12.5% of the variance (adjusted R2 = 0.113). Notably, the democratic and authoritarian subscales were themselves moderately positively correlated (r = 0.586). Conclusion: In this context, the controlling dimension of parenting carried the association with empathy while the warmth dimension did not, and the two dimensions were not opposed to one another. These findings support attention to authoritarian control in family-based approaches to adolescent socio-emotional development, and indicate that the cross-cultural applicability of classical parenting typologies warrants direct examination rather than assumption.
SN - 1664-1078
ER -