The Impact of Empathy Training on Social Problem Solving Skills in Female Students with Traumatic Experience

Human beings face many traumatic events throughout their lives with different consequences. Many children and adolescents experience stressful events during their developmental period, such as parental addiction or death of an elderly relative. Posttraumatic stress disorder is a complicated and chronic disorder that causes significant problems and disruptions in social and educational performance. There are several techniques and approaches to treat this disorder which may lead to different consequences. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of empathy on social problem-solving ability among girl students with traumatic experiences.

This study was a quasi-experimental research with pretest-posttest design. The study sample consisted of 36 ninth grade female students with traumatic experience, aged 14-15, in Rasht city in academic year 2017-2018 that were selected by purposeful sampling and then randomly divided into experimental and control groups. Traumatic Events Screening Inventory (Ford et al., 2002), clinical interview, and Social Problem Solving Inventory-Short Form (D'Zurilla et al., 2002) were used for data collection. The experimental group received 8 sessions of interventional empathy education, one session per week. Data were analyzed by univariate and multivariate covariance analysis.

The results of covariance analysis showed that empathy education significantly increased social problem solving and improved the components of rational problem solving and avoidant attachment style (p<0.01). However, no significant difference was found in the components of positive problem orientation, negative problem orientation and impulsive/ negligent style.

Employing empathy education and extending it to different social contexts can improve the social problem solving of people with traumatic experiences. This education can be used as a capacity to increase self-control for preventing the symptoms of posttraumatic disorder in social contexts.