Influence Of Group Training On The Level Of Empathy Of Middle School Students

Empathy can coordinate interpersonal relationship, promote Pro-social behavior. It is considered to be one of the important human social abilities, and also has played an important role in promoting the interpersonal relationship. Parenting style is parents’ attitude and behavior toward child in parenting, which comprehensively describs the parents’ education concept and reflects their implementation of parenting behavior. Parenting style has direct effects on parents-child interaction, as well as on the development of children in various aspects. In this study, we designed and implemented a series of empathy training program to improve the junior students’ empathy, and then compared the influence of different parenting styles on training effects of junior students’ empathy. This research contains pre-test and post-test designs between experimental group and control group. The experimental group participated in the empathy training activities for 9 times,2 times per week and 1 hour each time; while the control group participated in games activities for 9 times,2 times per week and 1 hour each time. Parents Bonding Instrument (PBI) was used on all students in grade one to screen out the paticipants before the intervention, then we divided them into experimental group and control group. They all have been measured with Basic Empathy Scale(BES) before and after the intervention. The scores have been statistic analysed and been qualitative analysed according to the students’ experience and group counseling evaluation table. The results shown that:after training the cognitive empathy of experimental group has been significantly improved, F (1,42)=10.25, p=0.004<0.01, but no significant difference has been observed in the emotional empathy scores, F(1,42)=0.35, p=0.56>0.05; while the control group did not show any change in all aspects. In the experimental group, the students of four kinds of parenting styles have no significant difference in the D-value between pre- and post-test scores.This study draws the following conclusions:1. After empathy training, the experimental group’s cognitive empathy ability has been significantly improved, and the emotional empathy showed no significant difference compared with before; while the control group’s empathy showed no difference from before intervention.2. There is no significant difference between 4 parenting styles students.