We examine whether story exchanges (where students take turns presenting a partner's story in the first person) increase empathic feelings and self-other overlap among adolescents. Students ages 13-16 years (n = 175) from a New York City public school completed measures (including self-report empathy and self-other overlap) before undergoing story…

Understanding others' perspectives and integrating this knowledge in social interactions is challenging for young children; even adults struggle with this skill. While young children show the capacity to understand what others can and cannot see under supportive laboratory conditions, more research is necessary to understand how children implement…

Humans need empathy to promote social interactions and to display prosocial behavior. Therefore, it is not surprising that low empathy skills are commonly seen as diagnostic features in several mental disorders. Empathy is an interesting topic in autism, since low empathy skills are responsible for the social difficulties that individuals with…

Emotion plays an important role in how young people acquire the skills, knowledge, and dispositions of engaged citizenship, including being able to empathize, listen to multiple perspectives, and build relationships of solidarity with others. This study investigated how social emotional learning (SEL) standards in 17 U.S. states guided the…

The ability to make inferences about what one's peers know is critical for social interaction and communication. Three experiments (n = 309) examined the curse of knowledge, the tendency to be biased by one's knowledge when reasoning about others' knowledge, in children's estimates of their peers' knowledge. Four- to 7-year-olds were taught the…

This investigation examined the role of students' social-emotional need satisfaction in relation to academic engagement and social-emotional skills. Among a sample of 501 secondary school students (and their parents/carers), several need satisfaction variables were examined: perceived social-emotional autonomy, perceived social competence,…

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) demonstrate atypical development, resulting in significant deficits in perspective-taking and observational learning. Children with ASD tend to have challenges in social interactions and academic performance, such as comprehending narrative texts, which heavily rely on accurate understanding of the…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects socio-emotional skills and perspective-taking abilities. Although social stories in a form of virtual reality program can help children with ASD, developing them and identifying appropriate responses might be subjective and thus challenging. Using Delphi method, and…

The purpose of this study was to identify predictors of friendship quality in adolescents with and without ADHD. The participants were 115 adolescents (61 ADHD, 54 non-ADHD), ages 13-18. The adolescents completed questionnaires assessing the quality of their relationships with their best friends, social perspective taking, anxiety and depression.…

In this theoretical paper, selected areas of moral development as well as some of the respective theories and models are used to characterise positive, healthy moral development. Such moral development is seen as one prerequisite of nonkilling. From a lifespan perspective, core concepts such as moral motivation and moral agency are combined into…

Perspective taking is one of the basic skills necessary for an individual to succeed in social life and begins to develop in early ages. In the present study, we examined the effect of preschool attendance on the perspective taking skills of children. The sample included 48-72 months children who attended (n=100) and did not attend (n=100)…

This authoethnographic study explores the co-teaching experiences of an international graduate teaching assistant (IGTA) assigned to co-teach an undergraduate course at a U.S. publicly funded university. As a sociocultural theoretical framework, Dewey (1938), Vygotsky (1978), and Schön's (1983) works regarding experiential learning, interaction,…

Introduction: As one of the most important requirements for healthy communication, empathy is vital in a great many occupations. Various studies have investigated the importance and level of empathy in various occupation groups. One of the leading occupations requiring strong empathic skills is teaching. Teachers need empathy to create an…

This study examined how factors associated with student development and persistence differ between first-generation and continuing-generation students and how participation in a learning community influences development and persistence. The findings show that first-generation students were less involved in academics and had lower gains in…

Games enable children to practice emotions in spaces that are free from actualized consequences. With thoughtful guidance, games can help children manage emotions, perspective-take, demonstrate empathic concern, and exhibit prosocial behaviors. Emerging research suggests that these competencies--also known as social and emotional learning (SEL)…