Empathy, Compassion, and Gratitude in Young Adults

Empathy is one's ability to understand thing from another person's perspective. It is the ability to put oneself into another person's shoes. Compassion is when feelings of empathy are accompanied by desire to help others on their sufferings. Gratitude stems from the recognition that something good happened to you, accompanied by an appraisal that someone, whether another individual or an impersonal source, such as nature or a divine entity, was responsible for it. Young adulthood is one such stage which is marked by rapid physical, sexual, cognitive, and emotional changes in one individual's life. In this stage, process of physical maturation becomes apparent and secondary sexual characteristics are fully formed. The present study adopts a correlational design to determine if there is any relation between empathy, compassion, and gratitude in young adults. It adopts a between group design for determining gender differences with respect to empathy, compassion, and gratitude. A non-probability purposive sampling method was used to select sample. During the data collection, 110 young adults were obtained out of which 55 are males and 55 are females. The findings showed positive relation between empathy and compassion, empathy and gratitude, compassion and gratitude in young adults. The findings showed gender difference with respect to empathy, compassion where females scored higher than males in both. The findings suggest that in today's world, if people could spend little time with each other out of their busy schedules, this would help them in understanding one another, their problems, their sufferings and they could help each other in overcoming it by showing love, generosity to each other and they would feel grateful for one another.