Background and Purpose: Aggression is a behavioral problem that occurs during childhood and can seriously harm empathy with others. Accordingly, the present study aimed to compare cognitive empathy between two groups of relational and explicit aggression.
Method: The study design was descriptive and causal-comparative. The statistical population of the present study included all high school students with aggression in Isfahan during the academic year 2013-2014. 120 high school students with aggression were selected through clustere random sampling method. The tools used were basic empathy scale (Jolieff and Farlington, 2006) and peer selection scale (Kirk's and Gratt, 1995). Data were analyzed using ANOVA.
Results: The results of this study showed that there is a significant difference between the score of cognitive empathy in two groups of relational and explicit aggression (P < 0.05); this means that the cognitive empathy level in the students with relational aggression is more than other group.
Conclusion: Based on the findings of this research, cognitive empathy in the explicit aggression group was less than relational aggression group that could be due to the fact that people with explicit aggression exhibited more aggression due to lack of adequate empathy.