An Experimental Research On Cultivating The Sympathy Of 3-5 Years Old Preschoolers

Sympathy is an emotional response stemming from another's miserable emotional state or condition that not consists the feelings of concern, agreement and support, but consists the motivation and behavior of concerning and helping others. With sympathy, the children can put themselves in others' position to understand others' desire and need so that they concern, support and help others. It also may be manifest in prosocial behaviors (e.g., self-effacing, helping, cooperating, or sharing) in child sociality.According as the structure of child sympathy, the characteristics of preschoolers 'sympathy development and the represent of preschoolers' sympathy behavior on the basis of the event sampling observation, this study designed cultivated courses for 3 different ages, including emotional experiencing, cognitive understanding and help behaviors. The training applied empathy experience, emotion retrospection, situation talking, telling stories, speech clew and role-playing to promote the preschoolers' development of sympathy. The courses were discussed and established by the graduate students of development psychology and the trained and seasoned preschool teachers. Participants were 333 preschool-age chiIdren(M age=3.6, 4.3 and 5.2 years,) from 12 natural classes of 2 preschools in Dalian. The field experiment was done 20-30 minutes twice a week and taken a period of 15 weeks. The observation and case study was doing at the same time.The results show that the courses are feasible, effectual. They can accelerate the preschoolers' other-oriented sympathy experiencing, sympathy understanding and sympathy behaviors. The critical age of cultivating preschoolers' sympathy is about 4 years old. The courses of sympathy cultivation should be actualized according as the gender differences in preschoolers' sympathy.