Empathy Training To Learn The Effectiveness Of Social Interaction Skills To Help Children 5-6 Years Old

Nowadays to help children learn how to communicate with others is an important content of mental health education in kindergartens. The terminal purpose of mental health education aiming at improve children's social adapting condition is a wish for children's good social communication behaviors. Nevertheless, any behavior of children happens or not lies on the inner psychological function, namely the emotional motivation, which will activize one's behavior efficiently. Empathy training, being as a sort of education activities, purpose of which is to improve children's capability in apperceiving, understanding and sharing others' feelings, more accord with ideal cognition-attitude-behavior mode in mental health education. Empathy training can help children apperceive and understand others, help them produce self-conscious favorable social behaviors, such as sharing, assisting, comforting etc, and help them know and accept themselves better, thereby help them gain social communication skills, strengthen their mental quality.Current study is directed to designing, organizing and putting in practice a set of empathy training programs in order to foster children's positive attitudes to others, and improve their abilities in apperceiving and understanding emotion and feelings of others, increase their levels of good social behaviors, ameliorate their self-awareness, help them learn social communication abilities, further their mental health. And from this process current researcher try to find out the general rules in this aspect of mental health education, seek out the prefect methods of this field and offer suggestions to the practice of kindergartens.The empathy training program lasting out for 35days is carried out among 33 five-six-year old children in a certain class of Shanghai Experiment Kindergarten. According torelationship between the cognitive and emotional factors of empathy, the program consists of two parts, concluding about 15units. During this period series of purposeful and designed abundance activities are preformed by ways of telling stories, asking and discussing, scene acting, playing games and arts etc. The design of current study uses for reference of "Learning to care: empathy training programs" made by American professorFeshbach and other studies of our country in this field. Compared with former studies, in current study more attention is attached to two aspects. The first is that the interaction of the cognitive and emotional factors of the empathy, especially the promotion function of the emotional factor, plays a fairly important role in excitating behaviors. The second is that children are the principal part in educational activities. These two ideas impenetrate the whole design and operating process.The main research method of this study is case study. At the beginning of the research 33 children are divided into four levels, according to the children's scores in the empathy capability measuring. At the same time, children's context is also considered, choosing these cases. There are eight cases are selected. Pre and post programs these cases are surveyed through nature observation and questionnaires, from which researcher try to know the same program how to effects on different individuals. And research quantitative methods are also used to recruit the qualitative data.The results have indicated that the empathy training study can to some extent improve children's abilities in apperceiving and understanding emotion and feelings of others, increase their levels of good social behaviors, ameliorate their self-awareness, help them learn social communication abilities, further their mental health. And also have proved that cognition-attitude-behavior mode is effective in mental health education.