Is Christian Faith a Predictor for Empathy?

According to the last census, the majority of the Romanian population officially declares itself as Christian. The core value of Christianity is love and compassion towards your neighbour. The objective of this study was to see if there is a correlation between Christian faith and empathy. The study was conducted on Romanian students. We had three groups of students: Atheists/Other Religions, Nominal Christians and Christians who daily practice their faith. For the assessing of empathy we used Davis’s (1980) Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), a self-report instrument and a multidimensional measure of empathy. A comparison of the IRI scores of the three student groups reveals that faith appears to be a predictor of empathy