Empathy of Juvenile Delinquents

This thesis copes with the research of empathy of deliquent youngsters-specifically their emotional and congitive part, it also evaluates the egoism or altruism of these individuals and their compassion level. The main purpose of this thesis is therefore to find out, what is the level and structure of empathy in these deliquent youngsters. The data was acquired by a specific TAT test and was evaluated according to the five subscales of SCORS ,which resemblance to empathy is proven in this work. Moreover, the content analysis of the acquired TAT protocols was carried out. The results of protocol evaluation according to SCORS system show low,yet not pathological values of emotional and cognitive empathy of youngster deliquents, additionally, they show their mainly egoistic motives across their social interactions as well as a pathological low level of compassion with others. In this thesis, the results, describing the level of cognitive and emotional empathy, are being compared to the Smith's theory (2006), which copes with the possibility of having a disorder caused by general lack of empathy in youngster deliquents. TAT protocols of respondents were also subjects of the content analysis, and its result show for example uncertainity in the external manifestation of respondents, "black and white"..