The main purpose of the current study was to investigate the role of empathy in understanding school adjustment of elementary school children. Specifically, the author hypothesized that empathy was positively related to school adjustment and the relat...
The main purpose of the current study was to investigate the role of empathy in understanding school adjustment of elementary school children. Specifically, the author hypothesized that empathy was positively related to school adjustment and the relationship was independent to the relationship between academic achievement and school adjustment.
Correlation and regression analysis on data from 149 children at their 5th grades of an elementary school located in Chungbuk Province supported the hypothesis. Specifically, empathy was significantly and positively related to school adjustment. In consistent with the previous studies, academic achievement was also significantly and positively related to school adjustment. Most importantly, empathy showed incremental predictability of school adjustment over academic achievement. Finally, the empathy-school adjustment relationship holds across sub-factors of empathy (i.e., cognitional empathy, emotional empathy) and the sub-areas of school adjustment (i.e., teachers, relations with schoolmates, learning activity, rules observation and school events).