The purpose of this study is to verify through the experiment the effect of educational intervention of counseling which can reduce the violent behavior of elementary school students by continually lowering their aggressive response and reducing permi...
The purpose of this study is to verify through the experiment the effect of educational intervention of counseling which can reduce the violent behavior of elementary school students by continually lowering their aggressive response and reducing permissive attitudes for the bullying. Seventy five 6th grade students in elementary school located in Seoul participated in the study.
Before the intervention, the participants performed the 4 point self-report Likert scale to measure the degree of permissive attitude for the bullying and the degree of offending experience in school. Then, they performed the aggressive response test, which was a type of computer game. Each participant was randomly assigned into one of the three groups; empathetic perspective-taking group, emotion contagion group, and control group, and was shown the video which was different for each group. As for the video, the scene of interview for the bullied child was included for every group but in the empathetic perspective-taking group, there appeared the caption that said “Imagine what you would feel if you were the main character” before the video started and halfway through the video. Also, there was scene that the bullied child, a main character, cried at the latter half of the video. In the emotion contagion group, unlike the empathetic perspective-taking group, the caption was not provided but the content of interview and the scene that the bullied child cried was same. In the control group, the caption was not provided and the scene that the child cried was replaced with the sentences that described it in order to prevent the participants from the emotion contagion. After that, measured were the participants' aggressive response, a permissive attitude for the bullying and degree of empathy. About 3 weeks later after the experiment, the degree of offending experience in school and the degree of permissive attitude for the bullying were remeasured as follow-up test and were analyzed.
The three hypotheses of this study are as below:
Hypothesis 1. The empathetic perspective-taking group and the emotion contagion group will show less aggressive response than the control group.
Hypothesis 2. The empathetic perspective-taking group and the emotion-contagion group will show the lower degree of permissive attitude for bullying than the control group.
Hypothesis 3. The empathetic perspective-taking group will continually show less offending experience in school and lower degree of permissive attitude for the bullying than the emotion contagion group and the control group.
Like the hypothesis above, the aggressive response, the degree of permissive attitude for the bullying and offending behavior in school were measured as dependent variables in pre, post and follow-up test in order to find out how the empathetic perspective-taking would be effective for the elementary students who had shown the offending behavior in school.
For the analysis, measured were the aggressive response in pre and post test, the offending experience in pre and follow-up test, the degree of permissive attitude for the bullying in pre, post, and follow-up test. Then, ANCOVA and Bonferroni analysis was performed to obtain the statistical significance and the effect size. As a result, the empathetic perspective-taking group showed significantly less aggressive response than the emotion contagion group and the control group so that the hypothesis 1 was partially proved. In addition, the empathetic perspective-taking and the emotion contagion group showed significantly lower degree of permissive attitude for the bullying than the control group which statistically supported the hypothesis 2. In regard to the result of follow-up test performed after 3 weeks, the empathetic perspective-taking group continually showed lower degree of permissive attitude for the bullying and less offending experience in school than the emotion contagion and the control group.
This study has significance in having proven the effect of empathy through the empathetic perspective-taking and having performed the follow-up test to measure the durability of effect.
However, this study has following limitation. First, the subjects was limited to the elementary students. Second, since the offending behavior was measured in self-report scale, it could be more subjective compared to when the peer notified the offending behavior or case about offending behavior was requested in counseling center. Third, since the bullied child was shown in the video as subject for empathy, not only the degree of concentration might be limited but also the application of the result in real life could not be confirmed.
The future study will be as follows. First, the effect of empathetic perspective-taking can be verified in each group after dividing the subjects into offending child, offending and bullied child, and victims. Second, the effect of empathetic perspective-taking can be compared when the bullied child as the subject of empathy was replaced with the child who got frequently bullied in real life by the offending children.