Firefighters and Empathy: Does It Hurt to Care Too Much?

Abstract Firefighters (N = 186) from two urban centers completed a set of questionnaires measuring empathy, traumatic stress, mental distress, aggression, world assumptions, and personality. Response rate was 81.5%. Both traumatic stress and mental distress were associated with higher use of emotional empathy. Emotional empathy was also related to anger, aggression, and sense of self-worth, as well as worldviews that included benevolence and meaningfulness. Of the big five personality traits, only neuroticism was associated with emotional empathy. Emotional empathy appears to be a substantial contributor to increased traumatic and general mental distress in firefighters.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Journal of loss & trauma

• Publication date

  2019-04-03

• Fields of study

  Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/15325024.2018.1525035
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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