The Effects of Empathy Education on Psychological Hardiness and Forgiving in Maladaptive Adolescents

Adaptation and resistance to the effects of stressful stimuli are essential to living and sustaining life. Numerous factors affect adaptation, the psychological hardiness of a personal characteristic that can impact adaptation. Furthermore, forgiveness is among the concepts that all divine religions have emphasized. Forgiveness is a change in attitudes about attributing the causes of self–action that leads to reduced negative emotions. Empathy training is an effective intervention that promotes psychological hardiness and forgiveness of maladaptive individuals and provides the basis for increasing adaptation. Maladaptation causes problems in students' social, emotional, and educational contexts. Therefore, considering the role of psychological hardiness and forgiveness in promoting the psychological status of maladaptive students and the importance of psychological and behavioral empowerment and promoting adolescent maladaptation, the present study aimed to determine the effects of empathy training on psychological hardiness and forgiveness among maladaptive adolescents.

This was a quasi–experimental study with pretest–posttest and a control group design. The statistical population consisted of all 13–15–year–old female high school students in Baharestan City, Iran, in the academic year 2018–2019. Thirty of them were randomly selected and divided into two experimental and control groups. Inclusion criteria included the willingness to participate in the treatment session, inconsistency based on the school counselor's diagnosis, no other mental disorders, like anxiety based on the initial interview at the Baharestan counseling center by a counselor, being 13 to 16 years old, and not receiving treatment or other training concurrently. Exclusion criteria were non–cooperation in completing questionnaires and training sessions and absence from more than two training sessions. The Psychological Hardiness Scale of Ahvaz (Kiyamarsi et al., 1998) and the Scale of Forgiveness (Thompson et al., 2005) were used to collect the necessary data. The experimental group participated in eight 60–minute empathy training sessions by JanBozorgi et al. (2008), two training sessions per week in one month; however, the control group received no intervention. SPSS and Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA) were used for data analysis at the significance level of 0.01.

The MANCOVA results indicated that empathy training was effective on psychological toughness and its dimensions (struggle, commitment, control) (p</em><0.001) and on forgiveness and its dimensions (self–sacrifice, others, self–sacrifice) (p</em><0.001) in maladapted adolescents. Moreover, the eta coefficient value revealed that the effect of empathy training on psychological hardiness and forgiveness equaled 0.578 and 0.542, respectively.

Based on the collected results, empathy training can effectively increase psychological hardiness and forgiveness among maladaptive adolescents.