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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1570187
Do teachers differ in terms of their empathy toward liked students and disliked students? The role of empathic motivation
Provisionally accepted- 1Hunan First Normal University, Changsha, China
- 2Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China
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Teacher empathy has been proven to be highly relevant to both the educational process and outcomes. Therefore, exploring its influencing factors and developing effective cultivation strategies are highly importance. The present study aimed to examine the effects of teacher-perceived student likability on teacher empathy and to further explore the role of empathy motivations. In Study 1, 138 primary and secondary school teachers (mean age = 38.0 ± 8.8 years) reported their anticipated emotional exhaustion, empathic motivation, and empathic reaction when they read a text that described a negative event involving either a disliked or liked student. The results showed that teachers felt less empathy in the former context. In addition, anticipated emotional exhaustion and empathic motivation serially mediated the effect of teacher-perceived student likability on teacher empathy. In Study 2, another 221 primary and middle school teachers (mean age = 34.8 ± 10.1 years) took part in an intervention designed to activate empathic motivation. The results showed that teachers' empathy toward disliked students improved and that the likable empathy bias was eliminated when empathic motivation was primed. These findings suggest that empathic motivation plays a crucial role in likable empathy bias among teachers in that it not only functions as a key mechanism underlying this bias but also emerges as a potential pathway for mitigating such bias. Our research has important theoretical and practical significance.
Keywords: teacher-perceived student likability, Teacher empathy, Empathic motivation, anticipated emotional exhaustion, Mediating effect
Received: 03 Feb 2025; Accepted: 10 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang, Shangguan and Huang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xia Wang, Hunan First Normal University, Changsha, China
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