The Intervention Study Of Psychobiographical Therapy On Empathy In Normal College Students

Background: Psychobiographical therapy is a process that transforms visitors’ life stories to positive ways,which could be achieved by guiding visitors speaking,listening,and writing their own complete life stories,as well as reading biographical stories of outstanding or idols.Existing empirical studies proved that the ability of empathy can be improved by sharing a single life event.Theoretical researches suggested that it could also be improved by sharing complete life stories.The main content of psychobiographical therapy is to guide visitors share their complete life story.So it can be speculated that psychobiographical therapy can improve empathy,but it lacked empirical evidence.Studies have also shown that sharing life stories by speaking or writing exhibited different effects on intervention.Therefore,different narrative modes may have different effects on empathy.Objective: This study designed a group counseling program based on Psychobiographical therapy,and provided it to normal students.The objectives of this study include examining the feasibility and effectiveness of the program,and exploring the impact of two narrative modes on the effect of empathy intervention.Methods: This study included two parts: 1)Status survey.Investigating the empathy status of 461 normal students through the Chinese version of the Interpersonal Response Index(IRI-C),which could measure empathy.2)Intervention study.Selecting normal students whose empathy level was at the bottom 27% of population,based on the status survey,whom then were randomly divided into experiment 1group(speaking group,35 persons),experiment 2 group(writing group,39 persons),and control group(40 persons).Participants were asked to share their own life stories by speaking(peaking group),or writing(writing group),while those in the control group was commanded to share others life stories by speaking.This research is a quasi-experimental design,and collect information from two perspectives:(1)Quantification: The IRI-C was employed to test the empathy pre-and post-experiment in all groups.In order to examine the effect of the group counseling.(2)Qualitative: Coding analysis and case analysis.Coding the life stories,which are shared by the speaking group and the writing group.In order to examine the specific indicators related to empathy in life stories.The coding indexes are related to empathy based on previous research,include: emotional tone,valence causal connection,and the number of friends-related events.In addition,two cases is drawn out and analyzed,which are from speaking group and writing group.In order to investigate the process of psychobiographical therapy on empathy.Result:1)Quantitative results:(1)The empathy of normal students is at an intermediate level.(2)In empathy,only the writing group improved.In the post-test,the speaking group and the writing group were greater than the control group.In the follow-up test,the speaking group was lower than the writing group.(3)In opinion-taking,both the speaking group and the writing group improved.In the post-test,writing group is greater than speaking group,and the speaking group is greater than control group.There was no significant difference between the speaking group and the writing group in the follow-up test.2)Qualitative results:(1)The emotional tone and the valence causal connection are related to empathy,but friends-related events is not related to empathy.(2)The emotional tone and the valence causal connection were increased significantly.(3)The results of the case analysis revealed that the case’s perspective has changed,changing from the self perspective to the perspective of others gradually.Conclusions: Group counseling program is feasible and effective for empathy,especially for opinion-taking.There are different effects on empathy with different modes,writing is better than speaking.