War-related empathy towards Ukrainians is positively related to RWA and negatively related to SDO

Ideological attitudes, such as Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) shape the emotions people feel towards various groups. However, how exactly this relation looks like remains unclear. Previous studies have shown that SDO is negatively related to empathy. However, the relation between RWA and empathy is less clear and could be more context-dependent. We hypothesized that in the context of Russian invasion on Ukraine SDO would be negatively related to empathy towards Ukrainians while RWA would be positively related to empathy. We conducted a longitudinal study in 6 Central European countries (total N in t2 = 6128). The first wave was conducted shortly before the invasion and the second wave was conducted in December 2022. The results show that in all countries apart from the Czech Republic SDO was negatively related to empathy. In all countries apart from Czech Republic and Hungary RWA was positively related to empathy.