Several Factors Influencing on Children's Empathic Behavior
Na Young Kim
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of both social-status and mode of stimulus-presentation on children`s empathic behavior, where empathy is defined as either the comprehension and recognition of an affective state in stimulus persons (others) or the empathic response to that perception. Middle-and lower-class kindergarten children were presented with a series of either short-sentence stories or short-pictorial stories. The subjects were asked to indicate how the child in each situation felt by selecting a "happy", "sad", or "angry" face to complete the picture accompanying each story. Immediately following the first question, children were asked to state verbally how the child in the picture might feel. The main results were (1) The mean empathy scores for the comprehension and recognition of an affective state in others and the empathic response to that perception was higher in middle-class children than in lower-class children. (2) There were differences in empathy scores to the three affective situations, i.e. the mean score for both happiness and sadness was significantly greater than for aggression, and (3) The empathy scores in the pictorial-stories were greater than in the sentence-stories.
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