The Relationship between Positive Mental Health types and Empathy in High School Students: Focusing on Positive, Negative Emotional Scenario Task and Sentiment Analysis

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between positive mental health types and empathy in high school students. It also aims to explore a method of measuring integrated empathy that can supplement the limitations of the existing empathy scales and encompass the complex characteristics of empathy. To this end, the study confirmed the relationship between positive mental health variables and empathy variables and examined the difference in empathy according to the positive mental health types of high school students. In addition, this study used emotional scenario tasks and emotional analysis as measures of emotional empathy and communicative empathy. The participants in this study were 299 high school students attending a high school in Seoul. As a result of the correlation analysis between positive mental health variables and empathy variables, the cognitive factors of the adolescent empathy scale and positive emotional empathy from the emotional scenario tasks showed a positive correlation with mental well-being and a negative correlation with psychological maladjustment. Next, as a result of performing an independent samples t-test to examine the gender differences in the empathy variables, the gender difference was significant in all empathy variables, with female students scoring higher than male students. Finally, as a result of ANCOVA using gender as a covariate to examine the difference in empathy between positive mental health types, the cognitive and expressive factors of the adolescent empathy scale, the perspective-taking and empathic concern of the IRI, and negative emotional empathy from the emotional scenario tasks were the highest empathy variables in the Flourishing group among the positive mental health types. Based on these research results, the significance and limitations of this study and suggestions for further research were discussed.