A Research On The Features Of Primary School Pupils' Empathy

Empathy is an important and unique form of emotional, it has been researched by social psycholo- gists and child development psychologists for a long time. Empathy refers to not only share the feelings of others, but also an objective understanding of others, it is an alternative emotional response which is caused by the emotional state of others. Empathy is an important factor for people to communicate with each other, it is helpful to have positive social relations, and it is developed in all our life. Many researchers believe that empathy can not only enhance the helping, sharing and prosocial behavior, but also reduce the attacks, and anti-social behavior. Therefore, the research on empathy is important to reduce crime or attacking anti-social behavior, increased helping, sharing and pro-social behavior. However, different researchers have different definitions of empathy and measurement methods, and also get different results. Our study used the definition of empathy which is definited by Janet Strayer and his empathy continuum tool to study elementary school children's empathy, discuss grades and gender characteristics of children's empathy, and whether children's empathy are different for different emotion. The results showed:1 There is no grade and gender differences in identification of the characters'emotions , most children can correctly identify the characters'emotions in the test story. 2 In the self-emotional experience, there was significant grade difference, the lower grades children experience significant less angry than the higher grade children, but in happy, sad and scared feelings there does not exist significant grade difference; On 4 kind of basic emotional self experience there is no significant gender differences.3 In the emotion dimension, there is no significant grade difference for children's empathy; But children's empathy for different emotion were significantly different, lower grades children's empathy of angry were significantly lower than children in higher grades, while there is no significant grade difference in empathy of happy, sad and scared; All groups of children's empathy for happy are the highest percentage, empathy to anger are the lowest percentage.4 Scores in the Empathy Continuum, the high-grade children's scores were significantly higher than the lower grades children, that empathy levels clearly increased with grade, and the raising level of empathy is as for cognitive development of children; With the age's growth empathy will be qualitative differences, that is from the cognitive empathy which is concerned about the external events to cognitive empathy which is concerned about the internal psychological state of others.5 In the emotion dimension and Empathy Continuum scores, the children's empathy are no significant gender differences.