Moral Intelligence and its Relationship to the Empathy Gap among Wasit University Students

The current research aims to identify: 1.The level of moral intelligence among university students. 2. Significance of differences in moral intelligence among university students according to the variables of gender (male - female) and specialization (scientific and humanities). 3. The level of empathy gap among university students. 4. Significance of differences in the empathy gap among university students according to gender (male - female) and specialization(Scientific-Humanities). 5. The correlational relationship between moral intelligence and the empathy gap among university students. The sample was selected using a stratified random method with equal distribution, to ensure that all categories of the original community are represented honestly and accurately, as the total size of the sample amounted to (400) male and female students, for both scientific and humanities specializations equally. Tools: After reviewing previous literature and studies, the researcher adopted Al-Ani’s (2025) scale for moral intelligence, while she constructed the Empathy Gap Scale, which consisted of (25) items. She extracted most of the basic psychometric conditions for them, represented by: face validity, discriminatory power, and the relationship of the item to the scale, as well as construct validity, in addition to reliability by the reconstruction method and Cronbach’s alpha coefficient Statistical methods: A range of advanced statistical methods available within the kit were used. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), as follows 1. The second test, a one-sample t-test, was used to determine the level of the research sample in the two variables: moral intelligence and the empathy gap. 2. The second test, the Independent Samples T-test, was used to calculate discrimination. 3. The Pearson Correlation Coefficient was used to verify consistency (Pearson's internal correlation coefficient: the correlation of the item with the total score, its correlation with the domain, and the correlation of the domains with each other), in addition to extracting the test-retest reliability coefficient, and to indicate the strength and direction of the correlation between the two variables. 4. Two-way ANOVA was used to detect statistically significant differences in the scores of the two variables, moral intelligence and the empathy gap, among the sample members according to these two variables. Gender and specialization 5. Cronbach's Alpha equation: (Cronbach's Alpha) was used to estimate the reliability coefficient using the Cronbach's Alpha method for both scales. Results: 1. There are statistically significant differences at the (0.05 and 0.0) level and the degree of freedom (399), favoring university students in that their moral intelligence is higher than that of the general population. This result is consistent with the findings of most related studies. 2. There are no statistically significant differences at the (0.05) significance level in the level of moral intelligence attributable to the variables of gender (male, female) and specialization (scientific, humanities). 3. There are statistically significant differences at the significance level of (0.05) and degree of freedom of (399), in favor of university students as they have less of a gap and are more empathetic than in the general community. 4. The lack of statistically significant differences at the (0.05) significance level in the empathy gap is attributed toThe gender is variable (male, female), and the specialization is scientific or humanities. 5. A statistically significant negative (inverse) correlation was found; the correlation coefficient was (0.45), which means that the higher the students’ moral intelligence scores, the narrower their empathy gap. In light of the above results, the researcher made several recommendations, including: The Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research is holding courses that will deepen the system of social and moral values of our society and country, and their participants are university students.