The Process Of Adult Criminals' Empathy Affecting On Aggression

The crime prevention and the criminal psychological treatment have always been the important points which the country and society pay attention to. Psychologists have done many related research about the factors which lead to crime. Empathy is one of the import factors. Many foreign studies showed that the relationship between empathy and aggression is negative. But the internal mechanism that empathy acts on aggression is not clear. And, relatively, related research is not too much. Based on General Aggression Model and related research, this article studies the course of empathy affecting on aggression, and explore the difference of the course between violent offenders and non-violent offenders. So we choose 621 adult offenders in Shanxi Jinzhong prisons as subject, of which 367 violent offenders and 254 non-violent offenders. Analyzing the data with SPSS.16.0 and AMOS.17.0 we find that:1) Adult offenders have a lower socio-economic status (SES), and the SES has an important affect on the relationship between empathy and aggression; 2) Empathy is an important variable inhibits aggression, and cognitive empathy has a more important influence on aggression than affective empathy.3) Compared with the non-violent offenders, violent offenders have lower levels on empathy, cognitive empathy and affective empathy, and are more prone to be irritated and distort other's intention,and have higher level on aggression.4) General Aggression Model can give a good explanation for the process which empathy acts on aggression. And in this process, there is no difference between two groups.4) In Structural model, the exploratory analysis showed that the two type of empathy has different relationship with different type of aggression.