Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: LARA GOMES DE SOUZA SILVEIRA

HOW DO WE SEE OURSELVES? EMPATHY IN DIFFERENT PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT

Human behavior; Socio-emotional skills; Development.

Empathy is defined as the act of observing and understanding another person's emotional reality, regardless of whether you have personally experienced it. It is a socio-emotional skill that can be enhanced through experience and training in an appropriate environment. To empathize with others, individuals must recognize their own emotions and observe them in others from a young age. Empathetic behavior can be influenced by individual and contextual variables. This study aims to examine how gender, social class, and age impact empathy. Additionally, we seek to investigate whether individuals with higher levels of empathy truly possess superior abilities to recognize emotions through facial expressions, as hypothesized in previous research. Furthermore, we aim to construct a predictive model that identifies the most significant variables contributing to empathetic behavior and conduct a methodological examination assessing the necessity for distinct instruments within various age groups. To explore the manifestation of empathy across age groups, we employed self-report measures alongside a behavioral test using an eyetracking device. By assessing the correlation between emotional recognition capabilities and empathic responses, we aim to gain insights into how effectively emotions drive empathetic experiences. Based on these findings, we will enhance the strength of empathy research by integrating two distinct methodologies and gathering data across diverse age groups, thereby enabling us to offer a more complete analysis of this behavior.