Empathy, Social Problem-Solving, and the Social Behavior of Preschoolers.

Abstract

A social skills intervention was implemented at two suburban preschools. The purpose of the intervention was to develop subjects' empathic and social problem-solving skills to test whether this training would increase prosocial behavior in class. In addition, the study compared the effectiveness of two teaching methods in promoting cognitive and affective skills: training using role playing and discussion-based training. The subjects were 45 children of both sexes between the ages of four- and -one-half to five- and -one-half years. At each school, teachers led one of three training groups: empathy and problem-solving using role playing; the same training using discussion; home and outdoor safety training, which served as an attention-control group. Training sessions were conducted for 15 to 20 minutes, three times a week for six weeks. Pre- and post-intervention empathy, role-taking, problem-solving scores, observational behavior ratings, and teacher ratings using the Devereux scales were administered. Results of pre-testing revealed expected, significant associations between cognitive and affective skills and between these abilities and subjects' social behavior, with empathy showing the strongest associations. Responses to affective measures, however, did not prove to be consistent across emotions. Empathic and role-taking responses to anger and fear stimuli were unrelated to responses to happiness and sadness stimuli, yet were associated most strongly with observed and rated social behaviors. No significant differences in gain scores emerged across the three treatment groups on outcome measures, although gains in cognitive and affective skills correlated significantly with behavioral improvement. The most likely reasons for this lack of training effects across groups were: all children were from a higher SES background and displayed fewer behavioral problems than subjects used by many other studies in this area; children at one setting (a Montessori program) were much less receptive to a group social skills approach; the small sample size provided insufficient statistical power to assess small effects. Implications of the study's findings for future measurement and training of empathy and social problem-solving skills were discussed.