Interpersonal valence of ethnocultural empathy

Abstract Understanding and accepting others who are racially and ethnically different from oneself (i.e. ethnocultural empathy) facilitates connectedness. Although levels of ethnocultural empathy differ across racial and ethnic groups, whether the interpersonal meaning of ethnocultural empathy also differs is less clear. One way of examining this is by using the interpersonal circumplex (IPC), which locates the interpersonal valence of psychological constructs across interpersonal space defined in terms of warmth and dominance. In this study we examined how ethnocultural empathy projected across the IPC both in general and for different racial and ethnic groups in a sample of U.S. residents (N = 443) using a bootstrapped structural summary method. Results suggest that ethnocultural empathy generally represents interpersonal warmth across people of all racial groups; however, for the Native American group, ethnocultural empathy also includes an element of interpersonal dominance. Further, ethnocultural empathy has a comparatively less warm project for people who identify as Latiné. These findings clarify the interpersonal nature of ethnocultural empathy and have implications for how people connect respectfully despite their differences.

It is more apparent now than perhaps ever before that there is a need to see the world from the perspective of people who are ethnically different from oneself.The propensity to do so-ethnocultural empathy-may promote connection to other people and to our shared global society more broadly.Understanding the interpersonal valence of ethnocultural empathy (i.e., the degree to which ethnocultural entails affiliation with and agency with respect to other people) may lend insight on how to increase it, and thereby mend some of the rifts that are increasingly apparent in social life.However, the interpersonal valence of ethnocultural empathy remains understudied.

Ethnocultural empathy
Ethnocultural empathy refers to having empathy for people who are racially, ethnically, and/or culturally different from oneself (Wang et al., 2003).Higher ethnocultural empathy is associated ABOUT  with positive changes in attitudes and increased kind behaviors toward other people (Irimia, 2011;Rasoal et al., 2011) as well as greater concern for and less anxiety about working with people who may have differing experiences and perspectives (Tittler et al., 2021).This latter point is especially important given that people of differing racialized, ethnic, and cultural identities increasingly live with, work with, and are otherwise in shared spaces with each other (Fix, 2020;Vaughn & Johnson, 2021).These identities are in part a manifestation of racializing processes, and lead to shared socialization experiences (Ogunrotifa, 2022).The shared socialization includes biases and prejudices toward people racialized as non-White that negatively impact them in variety of ways including the mental and physical healthcare services they receive, learning environments, and working toward structural changes (Kapıkıran, 2021;Kim et al., 2022;Lewis et al., 2023;Tawa & Montoya, 2023;Wolf et al., 2023).In contrast, increased ethnocultural empathy is associated with better services, patient outcomes, and has implications for the training and teaching of people who want to be service providers, such as in the nursing profession (Tittler et al., 2021;Valdez et al., 2023).For psychology in particular, diversifying the service providers may improve treatment engagement, case conceptualization, overall better outcomes (Bernard et al., 2023;Brown et al., 2020;Carballeira Carrera et al., 2020).
Ethnocultural empathy differs based on a person's identities (e.g., race, profession;Fix, 2020;Lu et al., 2020).For example, people with minoritized identities (e.g., people identifying as Black, Indigenous, People of Color, sexual and gender minorities) tend to be more ethnoculturally empathic than people with non-minoritized identities (e.g., people identifying as cisgender, heterosexual, White; Godcharles et al., 2019;Lu et al., 2020), a finding that holds even when accounting for factors like social privilege (Uehline & Yalch, 2021).Increasedethnocultural empathy is consistently associated with outcomes that might increase connectedness and interpersonal cohesion like social justice interventions (Hicks et al., 2023;Yi et al., 2023).Despite differences in levels of ethnocultural empathy across identities, what it means interpersonally for one person to have ethnocultural empathy for another (i.e., the interpersonal valence of ethnocultural empathy) is likely somewhat similar across people.However, measuring the interpersonal valence of ethnocultural empathy is tricky.

Measuring interpersonal valence
One tool that may be useful in understanding what ethnocultural empathy means to different groups of people is the interpersonal circumplex (IPC; Leary, 1957).The IPC is a two-dimensional space that psychologists can use to map the interpersonal valence of psychological constructs (e.g., behaviors, thoughts, personality traits).The IPC is composed of two dimensions: warmth is the degree of connection to and affiliation with other people (vs.coldness; horizontal axis of the IPC) and dominance is the degree of self-definition or agency with respect to other people (vs.submissiveness; vertical axis of the IPC).Warmth, dominance, and means of understanding people in terms of warmth and dominance are common across time and culture (Bakan, 1966;Cain & Ansell, 2015;Wiggins, 1991).This renders the IPC amenable to studying a range of constructs relevant to interpersonal perception and behavior, including basic and maladaptive aspects of personality (Du et al., 2021;Williams & Simms, 2016) marital relations (Lizdek et al., 2016), and student-teacher interactions (Pennings et al., 2018).The IPC may also have applications in interpersonal relations more broadly.
The IPC may be especially useful in exploring the interpersonal valence of ethnocultural empathy (Yalch, 2022).Ethnocultural empathy appears to reflect the ideas of communion people have with one another and should thus in general project into (i.e., be associated with) the warm area of the IPC.This may differ somewhat for cultures for which empathy for others has a different interpersonal connotation.For example, among some Native American groups, connection with people is based in part on the degree to which these people work to contribute to the group (Bethke, 2020;Doucleff, 2021) and thus has a dominant (i.e., agentic) in addition to warm connotation.We might expect similar results for people identifying as Latiné, whose culture both historically overlaps with that of Native American people and emphasizes work on behalf of others as a marker of belongingness (Gómez Villar & Canessa, 2019).However, this has not yet been examined empirically.

Current study
In this study we examined the interpersonal valence of ethnocultural empathy and how this varied across racialized groups, as racialization can lead to shared socialization qualities, and we seek to understand what ethnocultural empathy means interpersonally.We hypothesized that in general ethnocultural empathy would project into the warm area of the IPC.We further hypothesized that ethnocultural empathy would project into the warm-dominant area of the IPC among people identifying as Native American as well as among people identifying as Latiné.

Participants
Participants in this study were U.S. residents recruited using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk).In order to ensure our data was of high quality, we removed from analysis anyone missing more than 10% of their data (n = 59) and anyone who provided an incorrect answer to one or more of three attention check questions (e.g., "for validity purposes, please answer 'A' to this question"; n = 6).This yielded a final sample of 443.The sample was predominantly (64%) male and had an average age of 34 years (SD = 9.91, range: 18 to 73).In terms of racialized groups, we initially had eight categories for participants to identify their racialized identity: Asian, Black, Middle Eastern, Native American, Pacific Islander, White, and Multiracial.The eighth category allowed participants to indicate if they had an identity that did not fit the categories provided.We selected for analysis those categories that had 5% or more participants, grouping for descriptive purposes those categories with less than 5% as "multiracial or other".Thus in our sample, participants identified as White (46%), Asian (30%), Black (16%), Native American (5%), and Multiracial or Other (3%).No participant identified as Middle Eastern or Pacific Islander.Within the sample, 34% identified as Latiné, which we measured in a question separate from race.Importantly, although Latiné is an ethnic category, Latiné people are also racialized into specific groups.In this sample, a higher proportion of Latiné participants identified as Native American or as multiracial or a member of a racialized group not listed than as either Asian or White; the proportion of Latiné participants was also higher in Black than White racialized groups (χ2 = 45.14, Φ = .32;for details see Supplemental Materials).The study received approval by the local institutional review board and study data are available at https://osf.io/w3hcm/.

Measures
We assessed constructs of interest using a battery of well validated instruments, calculating scores for each scale using the mean rating of items within that scale (see Table 1 for psychometric information).

Ethnocultural empathy
We assessed ethnocultural empathy using the Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy (SEE; Wang et al., 2003), a 31-item questionnaire assessing perceptions and beliefs regarding cultural differences.Participants rated how much they agree with each item on a 6-point scale ranging from strongly disagree that it describes me to strongly agree that it describes me.Examples of items include "I don't know a lot of information about important social and political events of racial(ized) and ethnic groups other than my own" and "I share the anger of those who face injustice because of their ethnic backgrounds".Research suggests that the SEE has high internal consistency (α = .91)and convergent validity with respect to the Miville-Guzman Universality-Diversity Scale (Wang et al., 2003).

Interpersonal style
We assessed interpersonal valence using the Revised Interpersonal Adjectives Scales (IAS-R; Wiggins et al., 1988), a 64-item list of adjectives that describe interpersonal aspects of personality.Participants rated how well each adjective described them on an 8-point scale ranging from extremely inaccurate description of yourself to extremely accurate description of yourself.Each item of the IAS-R was associated with a subscale that corresponded to one of eight octant subscales of the IPC (warm, warm-dominant, dominant, etc.).Examples of items include "Friendly: Pleasant, accepting, and warm around others" (warmth subscale) and "Boastful: Proud, vain, and conceited: tends to brag" (cold dominance subscale).In this sample, the IAS-R scales conformed to a circumplex structure with a correspondence index of .72 (p < .05),which we estimated using the RANDALL program in R Tracey (1997).Research suggests that the IAS-R has high internal consistency (α overall range = .86-.75) and convergent validity with respect to the Big Five personality traits (Du et al., 2021;Wiggins et al., 1988).

Data analysis
We examined how ethnocultural empathy projected across the IPC using a bootstrapped structural summary method, which we implemented using the circumplex package in R (Girard et al., 2021).The structural summary approach estimates projections of one or more variables across the IPC using a correlation between the variable and the eight octant subscales.This is perhaps best understood by explaining the major elements of the structure summary.Model fit (R 2 ; values ≥ .70indicate good fit) entails the degree to which the variable's pattern of correlations with IPC subscales confirm to the expectations of circumplex structure (e.g., a variable's highest correlation with the dominance octant, second-highest correlations with the warm dominant and cold dominance octants, third-highest with the warm and cold octants, etc. would yield a high R 2 ).Amplitude is how specific a variable's IPC projection is (≥.15 indicating a differentiated profile) and entails whether how large the difference in size is between the variable's highest and secondhighest correlation, second-highest and third-highest correlation, and so on (such that the more specific the variable's correlation with a specific octant is, the higher the amplitude).Elevation concerns how high correlations are between a variable and IPC scales on average (≥.15 indicating a markedly elevated profile), and angular displacement is the area in which a variable projects in the IPC (measured in degrees and oriented counter-clockwise from the right from 0° to 360°).The structural summary also yields dimensional measurements of warmth and dominance (measured in terms of z-scores), which are weighted averages of the variable correlations with each IPC subscale (for more detail conceptual and mathematical review see Zimmermann & Wright, 2017).
We ran three models, one for the entire sample, one that estimated separate projections for each of four racialized groups (Asian, Black, Native American, and White), and one that estimated separate projections for Latiné and non-Latiné participants.We excluded from our analyses people who identified as Multiracial and Other because of insufficient sub-sample size.We estimated the power of each group's IPC projection based using an alpha of .05 and an effect size of .30(based on the commonly stated "personality coefficient" in survey data; Mischel, 1968) via the pwr package in R (Champely et al., 2022).Power was generally high for the Asian (β = .94),Latiné (β = .97),and White (β = .99)comparisons, and lower for Black (β = .73)and Native American (β = .27)comparisons.

Results
Ethnocultural empathy was associated with both female gender identity (t = 2.02, d = .21)and older age (r = .10),although these associations were both small.There was no association between ethnocultural empathy and educational attainment (ρ = −.05,p = .30).Correlations between ethnocultural empathy and IPC subscales ranged from negative to positive and were on average medium-sized (r mean = |.23|;see Table 1).
We clarified these bivariate associations in our structural summary analyses, all of which had excellent model fit.Across the whole sample, ethnocultural empathy projected neatly into the warm octant of the circumplex with a medium-sized amplitude and minimal elevation (see Table 2; Figure 1).This differed somewhat when examined projections by racialized group (see Table 3; Figure 2).Namely, for the Asian group, ethnocultural empathy had a marked positive elevation whereas the Black group had a negative elevation.These results suggest that interpersonal style is generally associated with ethnocultural empathy for the Asian group and not for the Black group.For the Native American group, the projection of ethnocultural empathy not only had a higher elevation than those of other groups (i.e., with confidence intervals that did not overlap with any groups with the exception of the Asian group), but also was the only projection that was warm dominant rather than just being simply warm.Across all racialized groups, levels of amplitude (z mean = .33)and warmth (z mean = .31)were generally medium-sized.Results of our third model indicated that the Latiné group had less specific (i.e., lower amplitude) and less warm projection than the non-Latiné group (see Table 4, Figure 3).

Discussion
In this study, we examined the interpersonal valence of ethnocultural empathy.Consistent with hypotheses, results suggest that ethnocultural empathy generally projects in the warm area of the IPC, although there were some differences in this depending on racialized and ethnic identity.These findings have implications for future research as well as for applied inter-group relations.
Across all participants in our study, ethnocultural empathy conveyed a sense of warmth towards, connection to, and affiliation with people.These findings are interesting to contrast with previous work on differences in mean levels of ethnocultural empathy across racialized groups.Namely, although research suggests that people identifying as White tend to score lower on ethnocultural empathy than those identifying as non-White (Godcharles et al., 2019;Lu et al., 2020;Uehline & Yalch, 2021), what it means to be ethnoculturally empathetic is generally the same across groups (i.e., ethnocultural empathy is warm).A slight exception to this is the interpersonal projection of ethnocultural empathy for people identifying as Native American.This latter finding is consistent with a more agentic sense of communal behavior, which in turn may translate into how Native people understand non-Native people.Less expected was the finding that among people identifying as Latiné, ethnocultural empathy projected less warmly than among people who did not identify as Latiné.One explanation for this may be that for Latiné people, especially in the U.S., communal behavior centers around the family rather than outside of it (i.e., familismo, the importance placed on family cohesion, loyalty, and the contribution to the welfare of the nuclear and extended family; Ayón et al., 2010).Accordingly, understanding people who are culturally different may be more of a pragmatic concern than it is an attitude rooted in a deeper sense of affiliation with others (which manifests in different ways).
Findings of this study are necessarily general, as all groups under analysis were umbrella terms under which many distinct groups of people fall.For example, Native American represents a broad category of people with different tribal identities (e.g., Apache, Blackfeet, Inuit, Iroquois), each of which may have a different interpersonal understanding of ethnocultural empathy.Similarly, Asian includes East (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, Korean), South (e.g., Indian, Nepalese, Sri Lankan), Southeast (e.g., Cambodian, Laotian, Vietnamese), and Southwest (e.g., Afghan, Persian) Asian cultures, and Latiné includes a wide range of Latin American cultures (e.g., Columbian, Mexican, Puerto Rican), for all of whom ethnocultural empathy may have a different interpersonal meaning.Even within the U.S., there are a range of factors that may also affect the interpersonal nature of ethnocultural empathy, including region of the country and political affiliation, both of which are key to many people's identities.Future research can examine each of these groups of identities in greater detail.
Understanding the interpersonal valence of ethnocultural empathy also has implications for how to understand and connect with people who embody different experiences due to ethnic origins and racialization processes within local contexts.To explain this, we can make use of an idea that pertains to the IPC and to contemporary interpersonal theory more generally, the principle of interpersonal complementarity (see Carson, 1969).Complementarity holds that across an interpersonal transaction, people will contrast each other in terms of how dominant their behavior is (e.g., when one person behaves in a more dominant way [e.g., a person speaks], the other person complements them by behaving more submissively [e.g., a person listens]) and match each other in terms of warmth (e.g., when one person behaves in a warm way, the other will be pulled to be similarly warm) and, especially relevant for this study, match each other in terms of how warm their behavior is (e.g., when one person behaves in a warm way, the other will be pulled to be similarly warm).Using complementarity to change behavior is common in the context of psychotherapy (Anchin & Pincus, 2010;Kiesler, 1996) and also has applications for broader inter-group relations.Communing with groups of people who have different experiences and perspectives, and focusing on what makes these groups similar is a mainstay of contemporary approaches to reconcile people with different racialized and ethnic backgrounds (Schneider, 2020).Future  research can examine whether taking such an approach yields increases in ethnocultural empathy specifically.
Naturally, complementarity involves more than one person, which necessarily entails a host of other issues that complicate interpersonal interactions.For example, person A experiencing empathy for person B does not mean person A accurately perceives person B. Rather, distortion in interpersonal perception is a given of classical interpersonal theory (Sullivan, 1953) and of contemporary research on interpersonal perception (Kenny, 2019).Of particular relevance for the study of ethnocultural empathy may be the stereotypes a person holds about people and how they treat these people based on those stereotypes (and how the recipient of these behaviors responds, the stereotypes they hold and act upon, etc.; Fiske et al., 2002).Exploring these ideas in future research might include examinations of different kinds of stereotypes and both how they project across the IPC and how they relate to actual behavior, and whether one's sense of empathy (ethnocultural or otherwise) aligns with accurate meta-perceived ideas (e.g., whether one is accurate in thinking about what another person is thinking).
There are a number of limitations of this study that suggest additional directions for future research.For example, in addition to having limited racial and ethnic representation in our sample, we were only able to examine ethnocultural empathy with respect to race and ethnicity separately.However, race and ethnicity (and other minoritized identities) intersect and potentially interact to influence the interpersonal valence of ethnocultural empathy in unique ways, but we were unable to examine this in the software that was available for our analyses.An additional limitation of this study is our exclusive reliance on self-report data.Although self-report is perhaps the most accurate source of information about race and ethnicity, people may be less accurate in describing their interpersonal characteristics, including how empathic they are.Finally, although our sample was adequately powered from a statistical perspective, it was nonetheless modest from the perspective of generalizability.Future research can address this by using additional methods to measure both interpersonal style (e.g., informant ratings) and ethnocultural empathy (e.g., behavioral observation in controlled settings) in a larger sample.
In this study, we examined the interpersonal valence of ethnocultural empathy, finding that ethnocultural empathy is generally associated with interpersonal warmth, although this differed somewhat depending on racialized/ethnic group.Findings suggest that understanding people who are racially and ethnically different from oneself is an aspect of a more general impulse to connect with people.This is important to keep in mind as people of differing ethnicities and racialized experiences come together.
THE AUTHORS Desheane Newman is a Doctoral candidate of clinical Psychology at Palo Alto University.Malia L. Moreland is a Doctoral candidate of clinical Psychology at Palo Alto University.Kyara N. Méndez Serrano is a Doctoral candidate of clinical Psychology at Palo Alto University.Matthew M. Yalch is an associate Professor of Psychology at Palo Alto University whose research focuses on personality and trauma.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Projection of ethnocultural empathy across the IPC (whole sample).

Figure
Figure 2. Projection of ethnocultural empathy across the IPC Broken Down by racialized group.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Projection of ethnocultural empathy across the IPC broken down by Latiné identity.

Table 1 . Correlations between and Psychometric information about ethnocultural empathy and octants of IPC
Note.Cronbach's alpha on diagonal; all rs > |.15| statistically significant at p < .05.

Table 2 . Results of structural summary analyses across the whole sample
Note.With the exception of displacement (which is expressed in degrees), parameter estimates (Est) are in z-score metric.