Structure And Development Of Children Compassion Study

This study conceives a measured structure of children's sympathy and makes up a teacher-rating questionnaire of children's sympathy on the basis of distinguishing empathy and sympathy conceptually. With the combine of multi-method and multi-index, the study assesses the development of children's sympathy impersonally. This study uses three methods such as teacher rating, situational experiment and natural observation. The indices conclude a teacher-rating questionnaire, a self-report of children and two behavior indices in experimental contexts and natural observations.The study found that measured structure of children's sympathy includes three dimensions of sympathy experiencing, understanding and behaviors and also contains six characteristics such as equal pain, corresponding worry, role-taking, emotion cognition, material assistance and psychological assistance. The questionnaires issued to instructors to assess the sympathy for children aged for three to nine years old have high reliability and effectivity.Combined with the picture-story technique, the study discusses the development of sympathy understanding based on two aspects about the degree of others' state and the emotion cognition cues of children. The results show that scores of emotion understanding are higher with the age, integration of facial and situational cues has advantage over facial or situational cues with the age in the emotion understanding; the 3- to 5-year-old children were found in the stage of describing situational information and projecting their own experience, the children have an advantage on empathic understanding and reprocessed understanding after 7 years of age; with the capability of emotion understanding, the children have a trend of increasing sympathy conception. Furthermore, that the emotion understanding affects the sympathy behavior represents more the quality. In the helpful strategies, the part-contribution strategy has advantage over the none-contribution and all-contribution strategies gradually.The result shows that there are partial children without sympathy experience in each of ages, the point of sympathy experience not only has a quantitative change, but also has different motive effects. The young children of 3- to 5-year-old have an advantage on equal pain experience. The children's experience in corresponding worry begins to gain an advantage over that in equal pain from the age of 5. Disparate pointed tongue cue has a distinct motive effect, and other-oriented tongue cue promotes children's sympathy conception and sympathy behavior. The results with natural observations and coding analyses show that the young children's cognition to plight focuses mostly on others' life, and with the age, there are tendencies in increasing concern about studies, however decreasing concern about social intercourse, need for material and physical problems; in the ways of responding to others' plight, the children with sympathy strategies increase in scale with the age, the children with escape strategies develop wavily, but the children with cognitive exploring reason strategies and those with aggression strategies decrease with the age; there are tendencies in assistance which the children with different assistance strategies and physical assistance strategies decrease in scale, the children with psychological assistance strategies and seeking others' help increase in scale with age, and material assistance strategies develop stably.Another result shows that a gender difference in sympathy understanding is not remarkable, but girls' sympathy experience precedes boys'.