Emotion understanding, aggressiveness and hostility. Mediatory role of empath, alexithymia and Machiavellianism

In the article results of two correlational studies (n = 152 and n = 148) are presented, which aim was to analyse relations between emotion understanding and different forms of aggressiveness. There was demonstrated a lack of significant direct correlations between emotion understanding and aggressiveness. In a mediatory analysis, several models of relations between emotion understanding and aggressiveness were developed, in which two dimensions of empathy: personal distress, perspective taking, and two dimensions of alexithymia: difficulties in identification of emotion, and externally oriented thinking mediated betweenemotion understanding and aggressiveness. peerReviewed publishedVersion