The effectiveness of teaching empathy on aggression and quality of relationships with Peers of male students

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of empathy education on aggression and quality of relationships with male students' male peers.  The research method was a semi-experimental design with pretest-posttest design with control group.  The statistical population of this study was all male primary school pupils in Yazd in the academic year of 2016-2017.  30 randomly selected cluster random sampling and assigned to two groups (15 people) and control (15 people).  Participants in the experimental group received sympathetic training in seven sessions of 90 minutes.  The data were collected using the Bass & Perry Aggression Questionnaire and Hudson's Relationship Questionnaire and analyzed by multivariate covariance analysis.  Findings indicated that 75% of the variance in the post-test scores of the experimental group was due to the effect of empathy education on aggression and relationships with peers.  Therefore, it can be concluded that empathy education affects the reduction of aggression and the quality of relationships with peers.  Also, empathy education is effective in reducing the dimensions of aggression (physical, verbal, anger, hostility) of students.