Developing young children’s empathic perception through digitally mediated interpersonal experience: Principles for a hybrid design of empathy games

Abstract

There is an emerging concern that modern technology‐saturated environments, particularly computer games, are inhibiting the development of children’s empathic behaviour and social skills. We argue that the solution is embedded in the problem when hybrid learning design blends real‐life social interpersonal interactions with digital representations. We present theory‐informed design principles for creating tablet games with a focus on promoting empathic perception—a building block for the ability to see, sense and understand other’s internal states. Based on these principles, the game Empathy World was developed and trialled in a naturalistic three‐month study in an early childhood education setting. Children learned to perceive empathy‐worthy cues in various scenes and interacted with the tablet game to further their perspective‐taking and to associate emotions with social contexts. The findings from this study show an increase in the selective tendency of children’s in‐game perception of empathy‐worthy stimuli and enhanced empathic concern. We argue that future design for learning can utilise the strengths of hybrid design for social development at a larger scale: integrating theoretically informed and rigorously tested digital tools in existing educational and social environments. What is already known about this topic Research has examined various developmental benefits of empathy and shown that empathy can be learnt. Digital games can be productive, easy to scale, tools that support learning. Sound design, based on theory‐informed principles, can improve the effectiveness of digital learning games. What this paper adds It synthesises theories and research evidence of empathy and its development. It shows how empathy‐related theoretical ideas and evidence were translated into hybrid design principles for developing empathy games and embedding them into children’s social learning environment. It illustrates how theory‐ and evidence‐informed design principles were used to create a digital game to enhance empathic learning of young children in a hybrid technology‐mediated environment. It explores and validates the effectiveness of a hybrid design approach by implementing the digital empathy game in children’s natural learning environment and analysing the data by capturing emerging patterns of development stemming from gameplay. Implications for practice and/or policy Pre‐schools could enhance children's empathy learning by integrating specially designed empathy games in existing learning environments. Teachers and parents should be informed about how to create game‐mediated hybrid environments that enhance children’s empathy.

A randomized controlled trial on the digital socio-emotional competence training Zirkus Empathico for preschoolers

“…In concordance, we detected increases in our secondary outcomes prosocial behavior and emotion recognition, and reductions of behavioral problems after the training for the Zirkus Empathico group, which is in line with previous studies using classroom SEC trainings (Wadepohl et al, 2011). The delivery of the training content (e.g., naturalistic videos of facial expressions) may have triggered an authentic perception of social cues (Wu et al, 2020). Additionally, as suggested by parent fidelity ratings, children were highly motivated to engage in the Zirkus Empathico training and families needed minimal effort to implement the training into their everyday lives'.…”

“…During the pandemic, digital teaching and training were among the only options to overcome face-to-face restrictions. Regarding SEC development, digital trainings have the potential to offer relatively naturalistic social learning by presenting animations and video sequences of facial expressions or social interactions (Wu et al, 2020). They may also enhance training motivation through persuasive design elements, and gamified reward systems (Kirst et al, 2015).…”

The optimal application of empathy interventions to reduce antisocial behaviour and crime: a review of the literature

“…Numerous empathy interventions have been carried out with general populations in non-criminological contexts and have proved successful in all age groups. Various promotional, prevention and intervention programmes involving children (Grazzani et al, 2016;Wu et al, 2020), adolescents (Carpio de los Pinos et al, 2020;Ingram et al, 2019) and adults (Leppma & Young, 2016;Romero-Martinez et al, 2016a) have produced significant increases in empathy with a variety of methodologies including teaching, interactive games and mindfulness programmes. Fewer offender empathy programmes have been administered and with various levels of success.…”

“…Recent research also advocates for the use of other empathy intervention styles simultaneously in both home and school environments. For example, tablet games such as The Empathy Game (Wu et al, 2020), which can easily be tailored to children's existing abilities and social contexts, are found to longitudinally increase the empathic perception abilities required for empathic responding by integrating real-life social interpersonal interactions with technology.…”

Hybrid learning spaces––Design, data, didactics

“…Wu, Kim, and Markauskaite (2020) and Bennett, Knight, and Rowley (2020) demonstrate two interesting examples practices. The first deals with principles for a hybrid design of empathy games for developing young children’s empathic perception through digitally mediated interpersonal experience.…”