The Effects Of Trait Empathy And State Empathy On Helping Behaviors

This study investigates into undergraduates' empathy and helping behaviors with 79undergraduates subject by means of questionnaire and experiment aiming to verify the causalbetween them by experiment. Empathy, as an individual personality character, has twointerpretation approaches of trait and state. This experiment will collect data from twoperspective of individual trait and state, try to comprehensively understand the empathyimplication and the relation between it and helping behaviors by combination of two. Thisstudy is expected to proving a new method for cultivating and training helping in educationalpractice in an effective way and evidence of character education scientificialization byexploring state, trait empathy and the relation between them and helping.Findings:1. Empathy as an individual personality character has two interpretation approaches of traitand state. Individual trait and state not only have some differences, but also have somerelations.2. In the urgent environment designed by experiment, it controls the level of every individual.Empathy is higher, and helping behavior is better. Empathy is lower, and helping behavioris worse. We can conclude that there is some causal relationship between empathy leveland helping behaviors.3. Individual trait and state empathy have some relationships with helping behaviors. Stateempathy is more close to helping behavior. We find that trait empathy influences helpingbehaviors through state empathy. In other words, state empathy is mediator betweenproperty changing and helping behaviors.