Development of Empathy through Stories

Children’s literature is an inexhaustible wellspring of the most varied emotions. Stories, fairy tales, vivid descriptions of the relationships between characters, their actions in various situations, the effect of their good and bad deeds on the emotional states of the protagonists all provoke an immediate response in children: sympathy for the victims and animosity toward the villains. This process combines judgments about the characters with emotional attitudes toward them and involves formation of a corresponding moral-emotional attitude toward the characters (Zaporozhets, 1948). On the methodological level, the most important aspect of the problem at hand are the ideas formulated by A.V. Zaporozhets (1948) and D.M. Aranovskaia (1944), that, first of all, perception of literary fiction is a special internal creative activity and, second, as a result of it, in the course of sympathizing with and feeling compassion for the characters, children develop a new emotional attitude toward those around them. In analyzing the laws governing adults’ perception of literary fiction, O.I. Nikiforova (1968) emphasizes the role of readers’ creative and emotional energy in this process and argues for the need to purposefully analyze the literary text. It should be noted that children’s emotional energy reflects, in essence, sympathy, compassion, and an internal co-acting [sodeistvie] with the works’ characters. All Soviet and foreign researchers approach these emotional states within the framework of the single problem of empathy. However, it should be noted that some foreign authors differentiate between sympathy [soperezhivanie] and compassion [sochuvstvie] (Allport, 1924; Scheler, 1926; Asch, 1952; Ballon, 1967; Wilmer, 1968; Stotland, 1971).