The Effects Of Empathy Training On Prosocial Behavior Of Primary School Students

Primary stage is important to the development of pro-social behavior. So how to develop pupils prosocial behavior is of great concern. Empathy is an important driving force for pro-social behavior, We want to kown if we can change pro-social behavior by enhence empathy ? Therefore, this study is to explore the impact of empathy training empathy for pupils prosocial behavior.In this study, Changsha City, a fifth-grade students in 30 randomly assigned to the experimental group and the control group, the experimental group was intervented by empathy training, the control group was intervented by group counseling which without empathy content. two groups are all 10 times training,once a week, every time is 45 minutes. The study used a pretest posttest design, Both before and after the intervention using Basic Empathy Scale( BES),Prosocial Tendency scale and an expression recognition test to measure experimental group and control group.And we provided situational prosocial cooperative experiments to measure the difference of pro-social behaviorof two groups after the intervention.The results showed that participanting empathy training can significantly improve the ability of students cognitive empathy( F(1,28)=13.487,p<0.01);participanting empathy training can significantly increase students anonymity(F(1,28)=10.198,p<0.01), altruistic( F(1,28)=8.536,p<0.01), emergency( F(1,28)=11.754,p<0.05) and emotional( F(1,28)=5.230,p<0.05) prosocial behavior tendencies; participanting empathy training can significantly improve Pupils ability to identify some expressions, including anger(F(1,28)=5.153,p<0.05)and sadness(F(1,28)=4.330,p<0.05); participants in empathy training who got higherscore in situational prosocial cooperative experiment(t=2.540,p<0.05); and significantly positive relatinships have been found with cognitive empathy and prosocial behavior tendency(r=.597,p<.01),and cognitive empathy can effectively predict prosocial behavior tendencies.It can be concluded that empathy training can improve pupils empathy ability and to increase their prosocial behavior.