The effect of empathy training game on the children's prosocial behavior

게임을 활용한 공감훈련이 초등학생의 친사회적 행동 증진에 미치는 영향

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of game-centered empathy training on the prosocial behaviors of elementary schoolers in a bid to suggest how their prosocial behaviors could be boosted. The research questions were posed as below: 1. Does game-based empathy training improve the overall empathy of school children? 2. Does game-based empathy training have a better effect on the cognitive empathy of school children or their emotional empathy? 3. Does game-based empathy training enhance the prosocial behaviors of school children? The subjects in this study were 62 children in their fourth year of D elementary school in Eumseong-gun, north Chungcheong province. They were divided into an experimental group and a control group, and a survey was conducted before and after the experimental group under-went empathy training for about six weeks. The instrument used in this study was David(1980)'s Interpersonal Reactivity Index adopted by Park Sung-hee(1996) to suit school children. Another instrument was Park Sung-hee (1997)'s inventory to assess the prosocial behaviors of children. The collected data were analyzed by SPSS 10.0 for Windows program, and reliability analysis and t-test were employed. The findings of the study were as follows: First, as for the effects of the game-based empathy training on the overall empathy of the elementary school youngsters that included both emotional and cognitive empathy, both groups got lower scores in posttest than in pretest. The experiment produced unexpected results, as the experimental group got significantly lower scores. This fact indicated that the game-based empathy training was ineffective. Second, the game-centered empathy training didn't exercise any influences on their cognitive and emotional empathy. The experiment had a reverse impact on the cognitive and emotional empathy of the experimental group, which implied that the training served as a factor to deteriorate the two types of empathy, and the hypothesis posed in this study was rejected. Therefore, which type of empathy could make a better progress by being exposed to the training couldn't definitely be determined. Third, the game-based empathy training didn't serve to Improve the prosocial behaviors of the elementary schoolers. There was no change in the experimental group, and this fact signified that there's something wrong with the attempt to develop school children's empathy to step up their prosocial behaviors. Based on the above-mentioned findings, the following conclusion was reached: First, the game-centered empathy training had no effects on boosting the overall empathy of the school children. Second, the game-centered empathy training couldn't be said to be effective in improving either cognitive empathy or emotional one. From a viewpoint of relativity, that could be said to affect emotional empathy more than cognitive one. Third, the game-based empathy training wasn't effective in improving prosocial behaviors. Rather, that resulted in interrupting the promotion of prosocial behaviors.