The three processes of empathy, creativity, and family therapy intervention are connected. A review of the literature about empathy has shown the therapist's level of empathy to be positively associated with certain traits: cognitive flexibility, cognitive differentiation, perceptual sensitivity, and tolerance of ambiguity. A summary of the…

Forty nonclinical psychology graduate students participated in brief small-group interchanges designed as psychotherapy analogues. The interaction was rated by trained judges, and the "clients" in the simulations also rated "therapist" empathy. The most powerful predictor of client-rated empathy was gender, with women receiving higher empathy…

Thirty-one prepracticum counselors were assigned randomly to two methods of confrontation skill training: (a) a cognitive self-instructional modeling group and (b) a discrimination/communication training group. The self-instructional group practiced aloud and, later silently, a set of questions designed to identify and to verbalize a discrepancy…

This paper describes a one-year longitudinal follow up study of the long term effects of role taking training procedures (in which children assumed a number of perspectives) on children's social and cognitive behaviors. Longitudinal and cross-sectional age effects were also analyzed. In an earlier study the effect of two types of role-taking…

This paper reports feedback from 349 fifth through eighth graders who participated in Say It Straight (SIS), a school-based drug abuse prevention program which combines assertiveness training with role playing and guided imagery. The feedback presented concerns students' feelings about sending and receiving messages using the following…

Research suggests that observers of spouse abuse are likely to arrive at overly dispositional causal explanations for the abusive behavior, and reject both the abusing spouse and his victim. To examine observers' causal attributions and person perceptions under varying conditions, 160 college students read a vignette about an incident of spouse…

This study compares the effectiveness of four experimental training programs designed to foster altruism in kindergarten children. Subjects were 97 children 4-5 years of age in six preschool classes. The children were assigned as a class to one of the six training and control conditions. The four training conditions were: (1) role playing; (2)…

Argues that altruism among preschool children is dependent upon children's understanding of a variety of complex cognitive and social skills and that these skills can, to some extent, be facilitated by appropriate training programs. (Author/MP)

This study examines the influence of a role-taking training program on role-taking, altruism and competition in children. During a 12-week period (30 minutes a day, four days a week) 96 3- to 9-year-old children were enrolled in a social perspective-taking training program at school. A control group of 96 subjects attended a regular school…

Previous research suggests that observers of spouse abuse are likely to arrive at overly dispositional causal explanations for the abusive behavior, and reject both the abusing spouse and his victim. As part of a study examining observers' perceptions of a spouse abuse incident under varying conditions, 160 college students read a vignette about…

The effects of assuming a disability in changing attitudes towards persons with disabilities were assessed in 18 undergraduate students who were enrolled in an introductory rehabilitation counseling course. The subjects were instructed to engage in two levels of assumed disability (one-hand bound and two-hands bound) in three settings (private…

The purposes of this study were to investigate the interrelatedness of several measures of social competence and to determine a valid and practical combination of procedures for assessing social competence in school or clinic settings. A total of 51 sixth-grade children (23 boys and 28 girls) were administered the following measures of social…

This paper provides teachers with 35 techniques for promoting preschool children's prosocial development. Research findings that support many of the techniques are cited. Some of the techniques refer to caregivers' personal interactions with individual children or groups, while others target broader systems and require involvement of families,…