How effective are interventions at enhancing preschool children's empathy? A meta-analytic review

Abstract

Empathy, defined as sharing and understanding others’ emotional experiences, is key to the formation of social groups and plays an important role in children’s social development. While enhancing this skill in early education has been a focus in the field, whether trainings employed succeed at enhancing children’s empathy, and what the mechanisms are behind their effectiveness, is still unknown. Importantly, understanding this is crucial to effective intervention. A meta-analysis of 30 studies (44 effect sizes) measuring empathy before and after a training, including 2,820 preschool children (M age = 5.08, range 3.41 to 6.46), was conducted using robust variance estimation to account for multiple effect sizes within the same study. Results revealed that interventions had a small to medium-sized effect in improving children’s empathy (Hedges’s g = 0.49, CI: 0.32, 0.66; p < 0.0001). Further, the impact of interventions on children’s empathy was moderated by intervention leader and the size of intervention classes, with researcher-led interventions delivered in groups having a larger effect on children’s empathy development than other interventions ( g = 0.77, CI: 0.55, 0.98; p = 0.002 vs g = 0.34, CI: 0.14, 0.54; p < 0.0001) . Child age and intervention dosage (number of intervention sessions times the length of each session) did not moderate the effect of interventions on children’s empathy. Our in-depth results urge researchers to use a variety of empathy measures to gain a better understanding of empathy development in early childhood, and encourage practitioners to target empathy in small groups, performing activities linked to emotion understanding, or book-reading and discussing characters’ emotions. Further implications for future research and practice are discussed.