A Study on Empathic Development in Korean Children

아동의 공감발달 및 관련변인

Empathy was defined in this study as the vicarious affective response of a person to the perceived experience of another. The purpose of this study was to study the relationship between empathic development of children and intimacy with parents, socio-economic status, and children's empathic response to specific affective situations happy, sad, angry and fearful. The subjects for this study were 8-, 10-, and 12-year-old children attending an elementary school located in Seoul. Among the subjects, 158 boys and 149 girls lived with their parents, and 20 boys and 35 girls were reared in orphanges. They were from a residential area with higher, middle, and lower class families. The instruments consisted of two modified empathy measures and two questionnaires developed by the researcher. One of the empathy measures was based on Feshbach & Roe's affective situation test for empathy. In order to determine the eight themes, 20 children were interviewed individually about situations that made them "happy, sad, angry, and afraid". From the pool of responses, eight themes representing happy, sad, angry and fearful situations were selected. Each story consisted of a series of three pictures accompanying narration. Another modified empathy measure was developed by the researcher based upon Bryant's empathy scale. This measure consisted of 17 statements describing happy, sad, angry and fearful situations. The items in this scale were selected from a pilot study. The two questionnaires developed by the researcher were to test children's intimacy for their parents and feminity. The data was analyzed with T-test and F-test. Children's intimacy with their parents, particularly, son's intimacy with their mothers, was a significant variable in empathic development. Children living with their parents had higher scores on Feshbach & Roe's Empathy Test than those brought up in orphanages. In general, the older the children the higher the empathy score. Girls were more empathic than boys on Bryant's scale. The subjects showed their highest empathy score in the sad, and the lowest in the fearful situation. The older the children the higher the empathy score in the sad and angry situations. These results reflected children's life experiences and cultural differences. Particularly, mother-son intimacy found in this study contrasts with the mother-daughter intimacy found in American studies.