Impact of an Empathy
Training Program on
Children’s
Perspective-Taking Abilities
Durmus¸ Aslan
Department of Early Childhood Education, Faculty of Education, Cukurova University, Adana, Turkey
Aysel K€oksal Akyol
Department of Child Development, Faculty of Health Science, Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey
Abstract
This study investigated the impact of an empathy training program developed by the researchers to promote perspective-taking abilities of preschool children. Participants were 34 children from two different kindergartens. Children in the treatment group attended an empathy training program that consisted of 30 activities and lasted for 10 weeks, whereas those in the nonintervention group attend the regular preschool program. Data were obtained through individual interviews with children. Perspective-Taking Test for Children, designed by the researchers, was used to assess children’s perspective-taking abilities. The results of the study demonstrat-ed that the training program significantly improvdemonstrat-ed perspective-taking performance of children in the treatment group compared to their peers in the nonintervention group, and this effect persisted one month after the intervention.
Keywords
Preschool education, children, perspective taking, empathy training program
Corresponding Author:
Durmus¸ Aslan, Department of Early Childhood Education, Faculty of Education, Cukurova University, Adana 01330, Turkey.
Email: durmaslan@gmail.com
Psychological Reports 0(0) 1–16 ! The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0033294119868785 journals.sagepub.com/home/prx
Introduction
A positive social interaction generally requires individuals to understand each other properly. In such an understanding, perspective-taking abilities play an important role. The term “perspective” has its origin in Latin (per-spicere) and means “seeing something” or “seeing clearly” (Moll & Meltzoff, 2011). Perspective taking expresses the abilities necessary for individuals to distinguish their views from others’ and to make accurate judgments about the views of others based on current information (Zhao, Wang, Su, & Chan, 2010). Perspective taking can also be defined as the ability to understand others’ per-ceptual, emotional, or instinctive reactions, even if these reactions are different than those of the individual (Brambring, 2005). Perspective taking plays a fun-damental role in the development of empathic behavior and prosocial skills, assisting children to communicate more effectively with others and resolve inter-personal problems actively and in a positive manner (Bal & Temel, 2014; Carey & Cassels, 2013; Marsh, Serafica, & Barenboim, 1980, 1981; Tjosvold, Johnson, & Fabrey, 1980). In the related literature, the relationship between empathy and perspective taking has been explained in different ways. Some researchers (e.g., Scarpelli-Dwyer, 2001; Strayer & Roberts, 1989) argue that perspective taking helps us to understand the emotions of others and thus contributes to empathic responses, while some (e.g., Davis, 1994, cited in Peng, Lee, & Heeter, 2010; Feshbach, 1978) state that perspective taking is a prerequisite for empathy, and some (e.g., Decety, 2005; Oswald, 1996) assert perspective taking is the source of human empathy. Parker & Axtell (2001) states for empathy to take place, the person experiencing it should be aware that the empathic arousal is because of the event happening to another one and should somewhat understand that person’s feeling. Accordingly, the level of people’s understanding of other deter-mines how they could experience empathy (Cited in Parker & Axtell, 2001).
Perspective taking includes three basic dimensions: perceptual, cognitive, and emotional. Perceptual perspective taking can be defined as an ability to make accurate inferences about another individual’s observations (Kurdek & Rodgon, 1975). Cognitive perspective taking refers to skill that enables individuals to understand and infer the thoughts of another individual in a particular situation (Fagley, Coleman, & Simon, 2010). Finally, emotional perspective taking can be defined as a skill to understand what others feel in a given situation and to make inferences based on that understanding (Laible & Thompson, 1998). In order to fully understand others, it is necessary to know the integration of their visual, cognitive, and emotional perspectives (Kahn, 2015).
Perspective taking is one of the basic social-cognitive abilities. Through this ability, individuals can mentally put themselves in the place of others and imag-ine what they perceive, think, or feel about a particular situation or object (Moll & Meltzoff, 2011). On the other hand, unfortunately, perspective taking is not an innate ability. However, it is an ability that needs to be developed.
Before acquiring this ability, children believe that others observe the world as they themselves do (Epley, Morewedge, & Keysar, 2004). Thus, the question arises as to when children start to take the perspective of others. Numerous studies in developmental literature have focused on the age at which children start to display perspective-taking abilities (Heagle & Rehfeldt, 2006).
The studies on the perspective-taking abilities in children date back to Phinney & Nummedal (1979) classic “Three Mountains Experiment.” In their study, Piaget and Inhelder presented a three-dimensional model of three moun-tains in different sizes to the children and asked them to identify how a baby doll would perceive the model from different viewpoints (Cited in Phinney & Nummedal, 1979). They found that children aged up to 7 or 8 years were not able to distinguish the perspective of the baby doll from their own perspectives; instead they attributed their own perspectives to the baby doll (Liben, 1975). They stated that the lack of perspective-taking abilities in young children is due to their tendency to assume that others see what they see, namely, egocentrism (Newcombe & Huttenlocher, 1992; Phinney & Nummedal, 1979).
The concept of egocentrism can be found in Piaget’s cognitive development theory as well. Piaget noted that young children are buried in their own per-spectives and thus fail in their ability to “switch in mental perspective,” which is necessary to differentiate between their own and others’ perspectives. According to Piaget, development of this ability is unlikely until the age of 7, when the decentralization emerges, which enables the child to simultaneously consider and coordinate between alternate perspectives (Burns, 1978). Furthermore, Piaget argued that perspective taking in an adult form could only develop after 9 to 10 years of age (Newcombe & Huttenlocher, 1992).
On the other hand, Piaget’s claims, that preschool children were egocentric and therefore unsuccessful in taking the perspective of others, channeled the several researchers to test these claims by simplifying the Piaget’s method. As a result of these studies, the researchers (e.g., Masangkay et al., 1974; Mossler, Marvin, & Greenberg, 1976; Walker & Gollin, 1977) concluded that Piaget exaggerated the level of egocentrism; it was not as prevalent as Piaget thought and children could take others’ perspectives from early years. Borke (1975), for instance, used a toy that was more familiar to children than the model of moun-tain and found that young children were more successful in perspective taking and less egocentric than Piaget thought. Similarly to Borke, Calam (1983) deter-mined that young children displayed perspective-taking abilities by modifying the Piaget’s method.
After the findings that perspective taking is possible for preschool children emerged, several intervention studies were conducted to improve perspective-taking abilities in children. Most of these studies aimed to develop a single dimension of perspective taking, while some adopted a holistic approach to develop all three dimensions of it. In these studies, it was determined that role-play (Wentink, Smitsvan-Sonsbeek, Leckie, & Smits, 1975), drama
(Burns, 1978; Burns & Brainerd, 1979; Dege, 2008; S¸ener, 1996), building con-struction games (Benz, 1981; Burns, 1978; Burns & Brainerd, 1979; S¸ener, 1996), collaborative learning activities (DeBellefeuille, 1989), thematic imaginary games (Aguero, 2013; Chien, 1995; Tan, 1992), short movies (Knoll & Charman, 2000), storytelling activities (Clements, Rustin, & McCallum, 2000; Grazzani & Ornaghi, 2011; Laible & Song, 2006; Ornaghi, Brockmeier, & Gavazzi, 2011; Tenenbaum, Alfieri, Brooks, & Dunne, 2008; Unu¨var, 2006), and philosophical discussion sessions (Tas¸, 2017) significantly improve perspective-taking abilities of children.
On the other hand, a recent review study that was conducted by Mori and Cigala (2015) reported that the intervention studies mostly focused on cognitive taking abilities of children. Based on the facts that perspective-taking abilities have a significant impact on social-cognitive development of children and the limitations of holistic studies aiming to improve perspective-taking abilities as a whole in children, in this study, we intended to assess the impact of an empathy training program on perspective-taking abilities of pre-school children.
Method
Participants
The sample was consisted of 34 children who attended two public kindergartens in Seyhan district of Adana, Turkey. Initially, we made a list of public kinder-gartens in this district. Then, we selected one of them randomly. After getting permission from the school administrators and parents, we assigned two of four classes randomly in the selected school, one as the treatment and the other as the nonintervention group. Children in both groups were attending the Turkish National Preschool Education Program, which was prepared by the Turkish Ministry of National Education.
There were 17 children (10 girls and 7 boys; mean age: 55 months; range: 49–67 months) in the treatment group and 17 children (9 girls and 8 boys; mean age: 54 months; range: 50–65 months) in the nonintervention group. Demographic characteristic of children showed similar attributes. Children came from low- and middle-income families and the majority of their mothers and fathers were high school graduate.
Measures
A demographic information form, including information about children and their families, and Perspective-Taking Test for Children (PTC), designed by the researchers, were used in data collection.
PTC is a pictorial test and includes three set of items about the three dimen-sions of perspective-taking (perceptual (4 items), cognitive (4 items), and emo-tional (16 items)). The first set includes the items about perceptual perspective taking. In each item in this set, there is a protagonist and there are some things that can be seen and not seen by his/her viewpoint. The child’s task is to estimate what can be seen from the viewpoint of protagonist in each picture.
The second set consists of the items related to cognitive perspective taking. Each item in this set includes an event that children could encounter in their daily lives. Each event is described by using a set of pictures. The pictures about each event are presented to the child in an order, the event in each picture is explained to him/her, and then one of the pictures (the one containing the crit-ical point, the cause, or the consequence of the event) is omitted. The child is asked “Now, if we invite one of your classmates and show only the remaining pictures to him/her and then ask him/her what happened in the pictures (or the reason/the result of event), what s/he would say?”. In each item, the task of child is to guess the cognitive perspective of the classmate based on him/her current information. Thus, if the child takes the perspective of the other child, it is expected that she/he would give a different response from the story.
The last set in the PTC consists of the items about emotional perspective taking. Each item in this set includes an event about one of the four emotional situations (happiness, sadness, anger, or fear) that children could meet in their daily lives. The face of the protagonist is free blank in each picture. Thus, it is aimed to prevent the child from predicting the emotions of the protagonist by observing her/his facial expression. During the application of this set, the pic-tures about the emotions are presented to the child randomly and the event in each picture is described to him/her. The task of the child is to predict the emotion of the protagonist in the current situation. The correct answer given by the child for each item in PTC is scored with “1” and each wrong answer receives “0” score. The maximum score that can be obtained in the PTC is “24” and the minimum score is “0.”
In the development of the measurement tool, the items of the PTC were initially developed by the researchers. Then, the pictures of the items were drawn by a professional illustrator. The adequacy of the drawings and instruc-tions were assessed by five experts from child development and education. The test items were modified based on the criticism of experts. The validity and reliability tests for PTC were conducted by the researchers with a total of 236 children between three and five years of age. To determine criterion validity, Empathy Scale for Children (ESC) developed by K€oksal-Akyol and Aslan (2014), and Perspective-Taking Test (PTT) developed by S¸ener (1996) were used. A significant correlation was found between the scores of PTC and ESC (r¼ .80, p ¼ .001). Also, a significant correlation was determined between the scores of PTC and PTT (r¼ .73, p ¼ .001). The internal consistency
(KR-20 coefficient) of PTC was medium (a ¼ 71). Furthermore, the test–retest reliability for PTC was quite high (r¼ .91).
Data collection
The program. The empathy training program which is designed by the researchers aims to support children recognize their own and others’ perceptions, thoughts, and emotions and predict the perspectives of others in a particular situation.
During the development of the program, initially, the philosophical and the-oretical foundations of the program were established by reviewing the related literature. As a result of the literature review, it was determined that there were two main approaches on the development of perspective-taking abilities. First, as mentioned before, Piaget states that young children are unsuccessful in taking the perspectives of others due to their egocentric thinking. According to him, perspective taking is possible only after seven years of age when the egocentrism disappears (Phinney & Nummedal, 1979). Actually, Piaget focuses on what children can do independently. On the other hand, Harvey & Charnitski (1998) argues that with adult support, children are able to accomplish more than they are able to accomplish independently (cited in Harvey & Charnitski, 1998). In parallel to Vygotsky’s claims, some researchers (e.g., Masangkay et al., 1974; Mossler et al., 1976; Walker & Gollin, 1977) state that children can exhibit basic forms of perspective taking even at an early age of 2 when the process and materials used by Piaget to assess perspective-taking ability of children are modified. This study is based on the second view that young children could demonstrate perspective-taking abilities at an early age when they are supported by adults.
In the design of the program, previous intervention studies were reviewed. During the literature review, it was observed that most of the intervention programs that aimed to develop the perspective-taking abilities did not reflect a holistic approach and included of a single activity type (drama, play, story-telling etc.). Thus, this study attempted to design a holistic activity program that included different types of activities.
The program involved two main parts consisting of 30 activities that aimed to promote and improve perspective-taking abilities of preschoolers. First part included six activities that intended to improve children’s awareness about their own perspectives such as children observing and drawing about a specific situation; making predictions about events that they knew little about and then comparing their predictions with the facts; and expressing their emotions under certain circumstances by narrating, drawing, or animating.
The second part of the program included 24 activities that aimed to improve children’s awareness about others’ perspectives such as children guessing what is visible to others or not; predicting what a story character who has lack of information about an event is going to do next; observing of the emotional
reactions of an infant hosted in the classroom with his/her mother, chatting about the reasons of these reactions, role-playing different characters, changing roles, and so forth.
The program was reviewed by the five experts from early childhood education and four preschool teachers. The activities in the program were finalized in accordance with the feedback obtained from the experts.
After data collection, schedules and material of the program were delivered to the nonintervention group teacher and information was provided on the implementation of the program. Thus, nonintervention group were also allowed to benefit from the program.
Administration of instrument. During the data collection, initially, a meeting was held with the school administrators, teachers, and parents to inform them about the study and their permissions were obtained. Prior to the data collec-tion, one of the researchers participated in a variety of activities conducted with children in the treatment and nonintervention groups that lasted for a week to get to know the children and for the children to get used to the researcher. In this process, a general information form which included demographic informa-tion of children and parents was completed by the researcher by reviewing the children enrollment files at school. The data were collected through individual interviews with children in a quiet room located at the school. First, Perspective-Taking Test for Children (PTC) was applied as a pretest. Care was taken not to conduct the interviews when children were tired, hungry or engaged in an activ-ity they enjoyed. Following the pretest, the empathy training program was implemented to the treatment group 3 days a week for 10 weeks. During the time when the program was not implemented, the treatment group attended their regular curricula. After the application was completed, PTC was applied as a posttest to children in both groups. In order to determine whether the effect of the program is permanent or not, PTC was reapplied to children as a reten-tion test approximately one month after the intervenreten-tion.
Data analysis
The data were analyzed based on descriptive statistics and normality test results. The Shapiro–Wilk test results demonstrated that children’s pre-, post-, and retention test scores were distributed normally (p> .05). Thus, the scores of children were analyzed with parametric statistics. An independent-sample t test was conducted to compare the treatment and nonintervention groups’ pretest scores. Paired-sample t test was also performed to determine whether there was any significant change from pre- to- posttest in the scores of the treatment and nonintervention groups. Besides, a covariance (analysis of covari-ance (ANCOVA)) analysis with the pretest as a covariate was used to compare the posttest scores of two groups. Finally, a paired-sample t test was done to
assess the paired differences between the post- and retention-test scores of the treatment group.
Results
This study intended to explore the efficacy of an empathy training program on children’s perspective-taking abilities. In this section, the findings about child-ren’s scores in the pre–post and retention test were presented. Descriptive sta-tistics were used to compare the pre- and posttest scores of two groups.
As demonstrated Table 1, the mean of the treatment group was 10.52 in the pretest and 16.29 in the posttest, while the mean of the nonintervention group was 11.11 in the pretest and 12.23 in the posttest. We performed an independent-sample t test to assess the scores of the treatment and nonintervention groups in the pretest. This test showed that there was no significant difference between the treatment and nonintervention groups in the pretest (t(32)¼ .787, p > 0.05). The finding indicated that children had similar perspective-taking abilities prior to the intervention. We also conducted a paired-sample t test to compare each group’s pre- and posttest scores. This analysis revealed a significant difference between the pre- and posttest scores of the treatment group (t(16)¼ 17.060, p¼ .001). There was also a significant difference between the nonintervention group’s pre- and posttest scores (t(16)¼ 2.786, p ¼ .013). The results demon-strated that the mean of both group increased from pre- to posttest. Therefore, a Covariance Analysis (ANCOVA) was conducted to compare the treatment and nonintervention groups’ posttest scores while controlling for pre-test scores.
Table 2 reveals a significant difference, in terms of perspective-taking abili-ties, between the treatment and nonintervention group after the intervention in favor of the treatment group (F(1,31) ¼ 74.03; p ¼ . 001; g2 ¼ .705). Eta squared was .7, indicating the program was highly effective on the perspective-taking scores of the treatment group.
In this study, we administered a retention test to assess the persistence of the effect of the program. Table 3 presents the descriptive statistics for the scores of the treatment group in the post- and retention test.
Table 1. Descriptive statistics for the pre- and posttests.
Group N
Pretest Posttest
x SD Min. Max. x SD Min. Max.
Treatment 17 10.52 2.03 6 14 16.29 2.56 10 20
As seen in Table 3, the mean of the treatment group was 16.29 in the posttest and 16.58 in the retention test. We performed a paired-sample t test to compare the scores of the treatment group in post- and retention test. No significant difference between the post- and retention test scores of the treatment group was found (t(16) ¼ 1.787, p > .05).
Discussion
The findings of the study indicated that the empathy training program had a significant impact on perspective-taking abilities of children. In other words, the implementation of the program significantly increased the perspective-taking performances of the treatment group when compared to the nonintervention group. Thus, this study extended the findings of previous studies indicating that perspective-taking abilities can be improved by an appropriate intervention pro-gram from early years (e.g., Aguero, 2013; Cigala, Mori, & Fangareggi, 2015; Geurts, Vanden-Abeele, Van-Keer, & Isenborghs, 2014; Grazzani & Ornaghi, 2011; Grizenko et al., 2000; Heagle & Rehfeldt, 2006; Khatchadourian, 2010; Laible & Song, 2006; Melot & Angeard, 2003; Ornaghi et al., 2011; Ping, 2005; Tas¸, 2017; Tenenbaum et al., 2008; Yagmur-Aras & Aslan, 2018). The findings of this study demonstrated that the activities in the program were effective in improvement of children’s perspective-taking abilities. The program includes activities that help children to be aware of themselves and others’ perception, thoughts, and feelings and to predict what they might see, think, or feel in a particular situation.
Play is one of the fundamental activities in the program. There are two types of play activities in the program: role-play and collaborative game-play.
Role-Table 2. ANCOVA results for the effect of the program on perspective-taking abilities.
Source of variance Sum of squares df Mean of square F p g2
Pretest 93.85 1 93.85 39.31 .001 .559
Group 176.75 1 176.75 74.03 .001 .705
Error 74.01 31 2.38
Adjusted total 7263.00 34
Table 3. Descriptive statistics for the post and retention tests.
Group N
Posttest Retention test
x SD Min. Max. x SD Min. Max.
play is a kind of play that allows the children to experience others’ mental and emotional states. Tan-Niam (2003) and Ping (2005) indicated that role-playing activities improved children’s perspective-taking abilities. While participating in such events, children assume a wide variety of roles. A child can take on the role of an infant; an old man; a teacher; a mother; or a happy, sad, or anxious person in different settings. To successfully animate such roles, children need to men-tally put on others’ shoes and experience the world from their perspective (Ping, 2005). Thus, children, who play different roles in role-playing activities, exhibit a better performance at perspective taking (Tan-Niam, 2003). Furthermore, chil-dren transforming their identity consciously into imaginary identities enable perspective taking and accelerate the decentralization process (Ping, 2005). Collaborative game is another type of play that players work together to accom-plish a certain purpose (Bououd & Boughzala, 2012). To succeed in such games, children need to be aware of and understand each other’s perspectives. Burns (1978) and DeBellefeuille (1989) found that collaboration-based games devel-oped children’s perspective-taking abilities.
Another basic activity included in the program is language activity. The stories narrated in the language activities and the subsequent discussions on the stories and protagonists help children to observe different perspectives. The past studies (e.g., Laible & Song, 2006; Ping, 2005; Tan-Niam, 2003) dem-onstrated that storytelling activities helped children to observe and understand different perspectives. Unu¨var (2006), for instance, reported that enhanced lan-guage activities that included prestory, story, and poststory activities significant-ly improved children’s perceptual, cognitive, and emotional perspective-taking abilities. Tenenbaum et al. (2008) stated that talking about scenarios that involved a variety of emotional situations and then discussing about the emo-tional states of the protagonists in these scenarios significantly improved the emotional perspective-taking abilities of the children. Similarly, Grazzani and Ornaghi (2011) found that narrating stories that contained terms associated with emotional situations and discussions conducted with the children on emotional situations after the story support children’s emotional perspective-taking abili-ties. Storytelling activities also improve children’s cognitive perspective-taking abilities. Clements et al. (2000) reported that telling children stories about sit-uations that involved misconceptions and subsequent explanatory discussions significantly improved cognitive perspective-taking abilities of children.
Drama is another main activity in the program. Dramatic activities contain puppetry, creative playmaking, telling a story, sound to movement pantomime, and improvisation (Van Volkenburg, 2015). Dramatic activities help children to be aware of themselves and others (C¸eting€oz & Gu¨nhan, 2010) and thus improve their emphatic abilities (Tombak, 2014). Past studies reported that dramatic activities enhanced children’s perspective-taking abilities (e.g., Akın & €Onder, 2003; Cigala et al., 2015; Dege, 2008; S¸ener, 1996).
The findings of this study also showed that the impact of the program on children’s perspective-taking abilities persisted after a month. Previous interven-tion programs also demonstrated that those had a similar permanent effect on children’s perspective-taking abilities. Cigala et al. (2015), for example, deter-mined that ecological training program that consisted of painting, narration, and dramatization activities had a significant impact on perspective-taking abil-ities of children, and the effect of the program was retained during the measure-ment conducted after six months. Similarly, Dege (2008) found that drama activities conducted with illustrated storybooks significantly improved six-year-old children’s perspective-taking performances, and their performance was retained in the retention test conducted one month later.
Conclusion
The study results indicated that the empathy training program significantly improved perspective-taking abilities of children. In addition, the effect of the program on perspective-taking abilities persisted one month after the intervention.
The findings of current study indicated that perspective-taking abilities of children can be improved by an appropriate intervention. Thus, we made some recommendations for teachers and researchers studying in this field. Teachers can design various activities such as drama, storytelling, and play that would improve perspective-taking abilities of the children and apply them in the classroom. They can make suggestions to families on developing the perspective-taking abilities of their children. They may provide a role model to develop empathic abilities among children. In future studies, researchers might investigate the effectiveness of an empathy training program on younger children. Materials such as story books and educational toys can be designed and their effectiveness can be tested on the perspective-taking abilities of chil-dren. Finally, longitudinal studies might be designed to monitor the effects of an empathy training that would be conducted during the preschool years.
Authors’ Note
This study has been derived from corresponding author’s unpublished doctoral disserta-tion entitled “Investigadisserta-tion of an empathy training program’s impact on preschoolers’ perspective taking abilities.”
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publi-cation of this article.
ORCID iD
Durmus¸ Aslan https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5204-7749
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Author Biographies
Durmus¸ Aslan is an associate professor of Early Childhood Education at C¸ukurova University, Turkey.
Aysel K€oksal Akyol is a professor of Child Development at Ankara University, Turkey.
