The Research Of Empathy Training On Improving The Peer Relations Of Junior Middle School Students

Peer relationship is in the first place of junior high school students’ value system. It is an important indicator of adolescents’ physical and mental health and social adaptation, which affects all aspects of the academic, emotional and behavioral adaptation. Negative peer relation not only hinders the development of students’ study and personality, it also leads to behavioral and emotional problems,or worse yet, to mental disease. Empathy is the predictor of students’ interpersonal skills, therefore it would probably promote the establishment of peer relations.Objective: This research aimed to observe the effect that empathy growth made on the improvement of peer relationship of the junior middle school students after empathy training.Methods: Positive and negative nomination was adopted among all the first grade students of a Junior high school, to screen out 75 students who were rejected by their classmates(the rejected type of peer relationship). Then we selected 48 participants with training intention from them, and randomly divided into experimental group, control group and no-treatment group, each group included 16 students(12 boys;4 girls), both experimental group and control group carried out the activity which lasted for nine weeks, 2 times per week, and each time for 40 minutes. Experimental group accepted empathy training, while control group carried out game activities, and no program has been operated on the no-treatment group. Due to the loss of participants, 14 students left in the experimental group, and 12 students left in the control group. The experiment was pre-test and post-test designed. The experimental group, control group and no-treatment group received the measure of Basic Empathy Scale(BES) and the Peer Relations Questionnaire both before and after the intervention. Four months later, Positive and negative nomination was adopted again in the class of the participants. The scores of tests of each group before and after the intervention were analyzed respectively.Results: First, when the pre-test scores of cognitive empathy were controlled as the covariate, paired comparison of Covariance analysis showed that there is significant trend between experimental group and the no-treatment group(t = 2.30, p=0.08). Second, at the score changes of peer relations,there is a significant difference among experimental group,control group and the no-treatment group [ F(2,39) = 6.11, p<0.05], paired comparison of variance analysis showed that there is significant difference between experimental group and the no-treatment group(t =-3.17, p<0.05). As well as significant difference between the control group and no-treatment group has been found(t =-2.73, p<0.05).Conclusions: Empathy training can improve the cognitive empathy ability of junior middle school students. Both empathy training and game activities can improve students’ peer relations.