EMPATHY AS RELATED TO CREATIVITY, DOGMATISM, AND EXPRESSIVENESS

Empathy (affective sensitivity) was hypothesized to be positively rela ted to creativity and expressiveness and inversely related to dogmatis m, when gender and age were controlled. Participants were 56 graduate students enrolled in counseling and educational psychology courses at a large southwestern (U.S.) university. Participants were administered the Affective Sensitivity Scale (Kagan and Schneider, 1977) to measur e empathy, the Statement of Past Creative Activities (Bull and Davis, 1980) to measure creativity, the Opinion Scale (Kleiber, Veldman, and Menaker, 1973) to measure dogmatism, and the Extended Personal Attribu tes Questionnaire (Spence, Helmreich, and Holahan, 1979) to measure ex pressiveness. The results of multiple regressions provide support for the hypotheses that empathy is positively related to creativity and in versely related to dogmatism, but the results do not support the hypot hesized positive relationship between empathy and expressiveness. Impl ications of these findings for persons serving as counselors and couns elor educators are discussed.