Empathy as an important factor in communication and interpersonal interaction among pre-school children

Abstract

Empathy means as much as compassion, ability, and the ability to understand the emotional state of another person. It would seem that if it is a feeling, an emotion, it does not depend on us whether we will feel it or not. Nothing more wrong. We can teach and learn empathy throughout our lives. In upbringing, it is mainly about shaping a socially, emotionally sensitive human being for all kinds of changes in the environment. This can be expected to some extent from pre-school children. The child's emotional processes depend to a large extent on the functioning of his nervous and hormonal systems - on the general health, and perhaps mainly from contacts with the closest family members, from early social experiences and later from the atmosphere prevailing in the peer environment. The pre-school period is the time preparing the child to study at school, stay in a wider environment. The level of empathy that he presents in pre-school age will greatly facilitate his communication and interaction at school. The presented research results were aimed at determining the degree of empathy in pre-school children. Analysis of the research material allowed to determine the empathic behavior of preschoolers in terms of age and gender and their maturation to empathy.