Can Universal Affective Education Programs be Used to Promote Empathy in Elementary Aged Children?: A Review of Five Curricula

Five classroom-based affective education curricula were chosen for review. While empathy is explicitly addressed in each, the curricula differ in how empathy is covered. We focus on how the curricula promote empathy because we view empathy as a keystone component of affective education. As Hoffman (2000) wrote, “empathy is the spark of human concern for others, the glue that makes social life possible.” (p. 3)

The five elementary curricula reviewed here are: Bully Proofing Your School, I Can Problem Solve, PATHS, Positive Action, and Second Step. An overview of the program is presented, followed by an analysis of the components of empathy included in the curriculum, a review of its practicality, a description of how generalization is addressed, and finally, a summary of current efficacy research. Table 1 provides publication information and a brief summary of how empathy is addressed in each curriculum.

The Bully-Proofing Your School (Garrity, et al., 1994) curriculum is a program developed to promote a caring and safe environment within schools. The program teaches a common language for students, teachers, and staff to communicate their feelings and needs regarding their safety at school. Further, it teaches skills that students can use to protect themselves both physically and psychologically from bullies.

In the Bully-Proofing curriculum, empathy is incorporated throughout the lessons and is defined primarily as the ability to recognize and identify other students’ feelings. Students are taught strategies to help themselves and others in bullying situations, and they are encouraged to use empathy with victims of bullies. All students receive basic empathy training, and identified “bullies” receive more intensive empathy training in small groups. While only one lesson of the general student instruction specifically teaches empathy, the skill is reinforced throughout many sessions by way of review, role-plays, and other modalities. Students are taught empathy as one of four strategies they can use to help victims of bullying (CARE; Creative Problem Solving, Adult Help, Relate and Join, Empathy). Specifically, students who want to be “helpers” are taught empathy by learning to state what is occurring in the bullying situation and identifying the feelings of the victim aloud. For example, the student may say that the victim must feel hurt and scared as a result of the bully’s teasing.

The Bully-Proofing curriculum addresses most of the major components of empathy. Through the curriculum, students are taught to label their own feelings as well as others’ feelings. Students also are made aware that other people will not always agree with them. Students discuss that people can sometimes look differently than they feel. For example, though bullies look and act tough, they may be sad or scared on the inside. In addition, the affective components of empathy are addressed. Through role-plays and discussion, students are asked to think about how they would feel in certain situations and about how others might feel.

In summary, Bully-Proofing incorporates many of the cognitive and affective components necessary to learn empathy. Although there are very few direct lessons on empathy, it is clearly embedded throughout the curriculum. Further, because the lessons are not scripted, there is the opportunity to supplement empathy training by using materials such as books and videos.

The Bully-Proofing curriculum can be delivered by mental health professionals or teachers. Lessons are not scripted, but there are examples and ideas for delivering the material in the manual. There are worksheets and handouts for the students to utilize. Role-plays are also central to curriculum delivery, though the complexity of the role-plays depends on the age of the students. Bully-Proofing is a relatively inexpensive affective education curriculum, as the manual is the only expense. The teacher can copy materials included for future use.

When implemented as designed, the Bully Proofing program places a great deal of emphasis on generalization. First, everyone in the school building should be trained in the basic philosophy, language and principles of the program. Caring behaviors are recognized and rewarded, while bullying behavior, wherever it may occur, is consistently confronted. The emphasis on school climate helps to promote generalization.

The impact of Bully-Proofing on bullying behavior was assessed in a suburban, mostly Caucasian elementary school, in the school district where the program was developed (Epstein, Plog, & Porter, 2002). The study was conducted over a four year time period, using students’ self reports about their sense of safety and the amount of bullying they experience. While there was no comparison group, the analyses were conducted using time-lagged contrasts between age equivalent groups. Results are impressive, showing improvement (according to student self-report) on each of four safety items: safety in the classroom, on the playground, in the cafeteria, and going to and from school. Similarly, on the three bullying behavior items—physical, verbal, and exclusion—a significant main effect for time was achieved. Thus, students’ self-reports indicate that bullying behaviors decreased significantly over the course of four years. Again, empathy itself was not assessed, but given that the program devotes a large percent of its time to empathy development, it is likely that the development of empathy was promoted, and helped to decrease the bullying behaviors. Further research is necessary.

A study currently being conducted by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence (CSPV) in Boulder, Colorado, is using five treatment schools and five matched control schools in order to assess the effectiveness of Bully Proofing on school climate (G. St.Martin, personal communication, May 21, 2003). This three year study, started in the fall of 2002, is promising for several reasons. Unlike much of the research conducted on affective education programs, this study is being conducted by an outside agency, not by those who developed the program. Further, the use of matched control schools will provide evidence that changes documented probably would not have happened without the intervention. CSPV’s study is not assessing individual student changes, such as empathy development, but rather, it is assessing school climate, using student and teacher ratings. The study is also carefully tracking the fidelity of program implementation, by observing lessons and class groups. This is an aspect of program evaluation that is not always carefully monitored.

The I Can Problem Solve (ICPS) (Shure, 1992) program is a classroom-based curriculum designed to develop a problem solving thinking style for coping with stressful social situations. The goal is to teach children how to think, not what to think, when dealing with typical adult and peer interpersonal dilemmas as a means of reducing and preventing later behavior problems that are clearly related to serious antisocial activity in adolescence (Shure, 2001). The original ICPS program, titled Interpersonal Cognitive Problem Solving (Spivack & Shure, 1974) was rewritten and retitled in 1992 as I Can Problem Solve (Shure,1992 a,b,c). Subsequently, three ICPS programs have been developed for use with preschool children as young as age 4, kindergarten-primary children, and intermediate elementary level children.

Empathy skills are covered in a majority of the ICPS lessons with minor changes in how these are addressed at the three different age levels. There is a clear emphasis throughout the curriculum on all four cognitive components of empathy. Initial lessons stress basic vocabulary concepts that play a role in coping during every day situations (e.g., same-different, before-after, some-all, if-then). Subsequent lessons are designed to broaden childrens’ understanding of an array of affective labels to describe their own and the feelings of others. For example, in the lesson “How might someone feel?”, children are taught to use and recognize a continuum of different feeling words (e.g., angry, disappointed, frustrated). There also are lessons to help children recognize that different people can feel different ways about similar events (e.g., “What makes people feel the way they do?”). These lessons clearly build an awareness that others’ viewpoints can differ from one’s own. Later lessons are designed to help children recognize that a person’s behavior does not always match how they feel and that a person’s feelings can change over time. Advanced lessons stress means-ends thinking, sequential planning, and other problem solving thinking processes. Children learn to carefully plan actions to achieve a stated interpersonal goal, to consider potential obstacles, to think of alternative solutions and to assess consequences that may result from specific actions. These lessons are designed to help children decide how others feel and to weigh others’ feelings against one’s own when identifying choices and assessing resulting reactions.

Many ICPS lessons also emphasize affective empathic responding. For example, in early lessons about how people feel, children learn to become more sensitive to other’s thoughts and feelings through listening and observations. In subsequent lessons, mediated dialogues are used to encourage children to determine whether they respond similarly to others when reacting to a specific event. As the curriculum advances, group discussions help compare personal reactions to events within the community and school. Instructors are also encouraged to promote affective empathic responses to more distal events by analyzing stories, historical events and news reviews.

The ICPS programs emphasize early language and thinking skills necessary for solving social problems (e.g., sharing a desired toy, entering an ongoing play group, or handling disagreements and disputes) versus impersonal problems (e.g., solving an abstract puzzle). ICPS is designed as a four to six month curriculum to be delivered on a daily basis by a classroom or preschool teacher. A supplemental program is available for parents who learn to apply ICPS principles with their children at home. Each curriculum contains a structured series of 20-minute lessons, games and dialogues typically delivered in a group format as part of the language arts period. The manuals provide a clear instructional format for each lesson and teachers are encouraged to employ a variety of social learning methods, including direct skills instruction, story telling, group discussions, teacher modeling, behavioral rehearsal and feedback, and peer role-play. All three curricula are broken into three lesson phases and similar language and thinking skills are addressed but at increasingly more sophisticated levels as students get older.

A variety of strategies are employed to promote and enhance transfer of ICPS skills. First, within most lessons, discussions and role-plays are typically focused on real life experiences. Also, during instruction, meta-knowledge is embedded in all lessons so that children not only learn strategies and skills but also learn why a strategy is used and when it can be most helpful. To further enhance transfer, adults at the school learn to use the same vocabulary and are taught how to encourage ICPS principles of empathy, means end thinking, and problem solving behavior throughout the day during naturally occurring events. All adults at the school know how to facilitate ICPS dialogues during actual conflict situations (i.e., when two children are having an argument on the playground over the sharing of an object). Children also are encouraged to mediate successful ICPS problem solving with peers outside of the classroom. Throughout the day adults reinforce ICPS skills by attending to natural consequences (e.g., “Johnny you knew how much Tom wanted to play with that truck and you gave it back to him. Look what happened. You made Tom happy and now he has asked you to play, so now you can play with the truck together.”). Finally, because the ICPS curriculum is designed to impart a problem solving process it can be easily incorporated into other curriculum content areas (e.g., literacy, language arts, social studies). In fact, teachers are encouraged to creatively integrate these concepts into academic lessons and the curriculum is easily adapted to fit the needs of diverse populations.

ICPS has been implemented and evaluated in many published and service outcome studies. An early study reported impressive outcomes with African American inner city children who were assigned to a treatment or control condition and matched on age, gender, IQ and teacher characteristics. Greater behavioral outcomes and higher social adjustment ratings were found in the children who had received ICSP training and these findings were maintained over a one year period (Shure & Spivack, 1988). In a subsequent study, long-term effectiveness was demonstrated (Shure, 1993). Children given ICPS training in kindergarten and first grade evidenced the fewest negative behaviors (i.e., impulsivity or withdrawal) in grade 4, as compared to children who received only one year of ICPS training or no training at all. Other controlled evaluations have demonstrated similar behavioral gains (Weddle & Williams, 1993) and additional academic improvements in older elementary students in grades five and six (Shure, 2001). While few studies of ICPS have directly assessed increases in empathy or empathic responding, the overall conclusion to be drawn is that this curriculum, when delivered with integrity over a long period of time, can promote social competencies and reduce impulsivity, aggression, and behavioral inhibition in children from diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds.

The PATHS Curriculum (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies) (Kusche & Greenberg, 1994) is a multi-year teacher administered, classroom prevention program intended to improve social emotional learning in elementary aged children. This universal prevention curriculum combines models of self-control, emotional awareness, and social problem solving. PATHS is founded on the principles that affective communication and awareness is linked to cognitive and social problem-solving and that emotional development is a prerequisite to most forms of cognition (Greenberg & Kusche, 1993). The curriculum content also has been tied to neuroscience work relating frontal lobe development and reflective language skills and to character development models that emphasize prosocial attitudes in addition to the role of social cognitive strategies (Greenberg & Snell, 1997). Created in the early 1980s for use with deaf children, the PATHS curriculum has subsequently gone through multiple field-testing with regular and special education cohorts. Extensive feedback gathered from teachers has been used to expand and improve the curriculum over time (Greenberg & Kusche, 1998a). Specific units in PATHS are designed to promote child-focused skill building and teachers also learn to embed similar social cognitive processes into ongoing classroom academic routines and to employ strategies that foster supportive and respectful interpersonal classroom relationships.

There are three major curriculum units that cover the domains of self-control, emotional understanding, positive self-esteem, relationships, and interpersonal problem solving: (1) the Readiness and Self-Control Unit, 12 lessons that focus on teaching a basic procedure for self-control (i.e., the Turtle technique, Robin, Scheider, & Dolnick, 1976); (2) the Feelings and Relationships Unit, 56 lessons that focus on emotional and interpersonal understanding; and (3) the Interpersonal Cognitive Problem-Solving Unit, 33 lessons that cover an eleven step sequence for interpersonal problem-solving. Relevant lessons to build positive self-esteem and peer relationships and communications are interspersed throughout these three units and a Supplementary Unit containing 30 lessons is available to review and extend concepts covered previously.

Empathy is stressed most directly in the Feelings and Relationship Unit where children learn to identify and label emotional states in themselves and others. There are lessons on recognizing verbal and nonverbal cues, recognizing intensity cues, affective monitoring, and developing an understanding of the perspective of others. Empathic realization of how one’s behavior can affect others is stressed. Later lessons in this unit involve more complex links between behaviors and emotions and discussions of internationality, the ability to have simultaneous feelings, to hide feelings, and to change feelings. A simplified affective management and problem-solving model is introduced in the latter lessons to further encourage empathic responding and self-control.

The newest PATHS curriculum (2000) includes a series of 50 lessons with separate curriculum materials for grades K-5^th. Classroom teachers typically teach a minimum of two 30-minute lessons each week. The ideal goal is for teachers to integrate the PATHS curriculum into ongoing academic curriculum at the school. PATHS is an expansive and flexible program that allows implementation over a 5 year period. Any particular lesson can run from one to five or more sessions, depending on the needs of specific children or classrooms. The PATHS Curriculum consists of an Instructional Manual for teachers, six volumes of multi-aged lessons, pictures, photographs, posters, Feeling Faces, and additional materials. Most of the materials that are needed are included, but supplementary materials can be added as desired. (See Greenberg & Kusche, 1998a for more detailed information).

A unique feature of PATHS is its focus on ongoing generalization techniques used in the classroom throughout the day. To ensure that children apply the PATHS skills to new contexts specific reminders and visual cues are provided across the curriculum to encourage children to employ these skills during the day in various other contexts. For example, during the Feelings and Relationships Unit, children develop personalized Feeling Faces that fit into a strip attached to their desks so that they can communicate feelings throughout the day. Prompts are also given at key transition times to encourage children to evaluate how they feel. A variety of classroom generalization activities and strategies are provided in the teacher manual for how to link the concepts under study to academic content areas and to activities outside of the classroom. To encourage generalization to the home environment, printed parent letters and information are provided in the curricular lessons as materials to send home. “Home activity assignments” are also included for children to complete with parents and other family members.

PATHS has been awarded Blueprint Status (Blueprint, 1998) and has been recognized as a model program by SAMHSA, CDC, and the Department of Education. Most recently, CASEL (2003) cited the PATHS program as the most comprehensive social-emotional learning curriculum researched to date that targets elementary-age children. In an early effectiveness study, elementary deaf children randomly assigned to an initial version of PATHS versus a control intervention, displayed greater improvements in social problem-solving and emotional recognition skills, and were rated higher by teachers and parents on several indices of social competence (Greenberg & Kusche, 1993). Importantly, the children with the greatest emotional gains also were rated as showing the greatest improvements in classroom behavior. Intervention children also displayed improvement on several cognitive/academic measures (i.e., the Reading Section of the Stanford Achievement Test) and these findings were replicated with a wait-list control group who received the PATHS intervention the next year.

Subsequent well-controlled efficacy studies have validated positive PATHS outcomes with regular and special education students (Greenberg & Kusche, 1998b; Greenberg, Kusche, Cook, & Guamma, 1995). Compared to controls, PATHS children have shown significant post-test improvements in emotional understanding, social problem-solving, cognitive reflectivity, and adult and self-reported internalizing and externalizing problems, with specific reductions in ratings of aggression. The effectiveness of the PATHS as a universal prevention program was most recently validated in a large, multi-site, randomized study of an integrated approach designed to serve all children entering school as well as those who were already showing signs of early behavioral and academic difficulties (Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, 2000).

Thus, PATHS has been found to improve social cognitions and social-emotional competencies and to reduce important risk behaviors such as aggression and depression across a wide variety of elementary school-aged children as reflected in teacher ratings, self-reports, and individual child assessments. Successful, but more limited outcomes have also been found with traditional cognitive or academic measures of school success. These results appear to be mediated by significant social learning improvements including the ability to focus attention, reduce impulsivity, and regulate affect.

Positive Action (Gerber, 1998) is an affective education program that is designed to be used daily in classrooms. It teaches that positive thoughts lead to positive actions, which lead to positive feelings, which in turn lead to positive thoughts. It strongly emphasizes the importance of self-concept. There is a separate curriculum kit for each grade, kindergarten through seventh. Students in each grade learn the same concept of Positive Action at the same time. For example, everyone in the school should be considering “managing yourself using emotional positive actions” at the same time. Thus, Positive Action aims to change the school climate as well as provide daily lessons. Monthly assemblies reinforce the ideas taught in the classroom as well as acknowledge prosocial behaviors. Ideally, the Positive Action program permeates the school, and the cafeteria staff as well as the principal are aware of its focus and mission.

Empathy is defined as “thinking how others feel”. It is practiced in the unit on “Getting Along with Others Using Emotional Positive Actions.” Empathy is not the most central component of the program, which emphasizes self-concept, but it is embedded in the main idea of using “positive thoughts to make positive actions.”

Empathy is practiced by relating to characters in stories and identifying the feelings of characters drawn in pictures. Students are encouraged to treat others the way they would like to be treated.

In regards to the cognitive components of empathy, the Positive Action curriculum emphasizes students’ ability to identify their own feelings and know themselves. There is some consideration given to labeling others’ feelings and to acknowledging mixed feelings. However, with the emphasis on treating others the way you would like to be treated, Positive Action does little to help children realize that other people may have viewpoints that differ from their own, or that behavior does not always match feelings.

In terms of the affective components of empathy, there is an emphasis on controlling one’s own emotions, often a critical prerequisite to empathizing, but there are few exercises likely to evoke a real sense of feeling for another.

Daily lessons are taught by the classroom teacher. Lessons take approximately 15 minutes and are simple to follow. They often include a story and discussion, although there are some worksheets. It is important to note that for the Positive Action program to be fully implemented, the entire staff needs to be aware of the various units and able to support the central ideas. Assemblies need to be scheduled on a roughly monthly basis, at the end of each unit.

Each grade level at a school studies the same concept at the same time, which encourages generalization. Assemblies rewarding students for their progress in developing the new skills presented also helps with generalization. Positive Action provides some materials to be shared with parents, as well as ideas on how to encourage parents to become involved with Positive Action. When implemented as designed, Positive Action permeates the school climate.

While there have been no studies regarding the development of empathy in Positive Action participants, several related factors have been assessed, such as suspensions for violence, school climate, and self-concept.

The publishers of Positive Action conducted a controlled study within the Clark County, Nevada School District (Positive Action, Inc., 1999), in which reading levels and suspensions for violence were measured. Schools utilizing the Positive Action program showed significant gains in reading, particularly in schools with low mobility rates, and a significant decrease in suspensions for violence. The reduction in suspensions for violence was maintained even in schools with high mobility and within schools with a large minority population (>40%). Again, it is likely that the reduction in school violence is related to improved empathy among peers.

In summary, Positive Action emphasizes school climate and helping children develop a positive self-concept. While some aspects of empathy are addressed, it does not provide comprehensive empathy training. However, initial research does indicate that the program results in improved school climate, self-concept, and reduced incidences of school violence.

Second Step (Committee for Children, 1992; 2002) is a classroom curriculum designed to reduce school violence. The curriculum, developed for preschool through ninth grades, addresses three main skills: empathy, impulse control, and anger management. Skills are taught, modeled, practiced, and reinforced. In the Second Step curriculum, empathy is viewed as a critical set of skills involving the ability to recognize, experience, and respond to the feelings of others. Empathy is emphasized heavily in the curriculum, although the number of lessons specifically designed to teach empathy varies with the age of the student. First graders participate in seven empathy lessons, second and third graders five, fourth graders nine, and fifth graders, six.

The Second Step curriculum is designed to be delivered by classroom teachers and it is scripted and easy to follow. The curriculum relies heavily on photographs, which the teacher uses to guide discussions about feelings. Children learn to label feelings in others, to understand that people may have different feelings about the same event, and to communicate feelings. In Second Step, the teacher also shows a brief video and then uses a study guide to encourage children to think about how it would feel to be lost. Children are prompted to think of a time when they were lost or separated from their group. In order to empathize, children are taught to read the facial and body language of other people, as well as listen to what they say and how they say it. Finally, children are taught to think of how they would feel in that situation, in order to figure out how that person feels.

The Second Step curriculum addresses most of the components of empathy, as it is defined above. The curriculum attempts to teach children perspective taking, and addresses three out of four cognitive components of empathy as defined here. Children do practice labeling feelings, both in themselves and in others. They learn that people may have multiple feelings. The curriculum also has lessons about recognizing differences. These lessons help children understand that people may have opinions or feelings about things, which differ from their own. However, the curriculum teaches children to read others’ body language, and it does not address how people can sometimes look differently than they feel. The final cognitive component of empathy, weighing others’ feelings and motivations in conjunction with one’s own, is embedded in several lessons such as that on similarities and differences, and the lesson on fairness. All three of the affective components of empathy are embedded in the Second Step curriculum, as children are encouraged to think about how they would feel in certain situations, and then are expected to generalize that to understand how others, in a distant situation, would feel. However, it is the opinion of these authors that scenarios presented in the curriculum do not tend to evoke strong emotion. The revised edition (2002) makes some improvement in this area, by replacing the series of still photographs with live action videotape.

Second Step should be delivered weekly by the classroom teacher. Lessons are very easy to follow, requiring minimal preparation. While Second Step is more expensive than the other curricula reviewed here, its use of photography and video, which are appealing to students, may make it worth the investment.

Generalization is consistently promoted through encouraging the children to relate new concepts they learn to their own lives. Further, new skills are practiced through role-play. A complementary program “Steps to Respect” (Committee for Children, 2002) uses literature to support the violence prevention program. There is also the “Second Step Family Guide” (Committee for Children, 1995; 2000) that provides a six-session workshop series for parents which covers the skills taught in the Second Step curriculum. The Family Guide uses videos, outlines for workshop facilitators, and masters for at-home activities.

A controlled, randomized study of Second Step showed a moderate decrease in physically aggressive behavior and an increase in neutral or prosocial behaviors (Grossman et al., 1997). Parent and teacher behavior ratings were analyzed along with observational data. The rating scales only covered externalizing behaviors such as aggression and delinquency. The observational data provided a measure of prosocial and neutral behaviors, verbally negative and physically negative behaviors. Thus, there is no measure of empathy per se, but one might infer that the increase in prosocial behaviors and coinciding decrease of aggression may be related to improved empathy. Of note, the greatest differences between control and treatment schools were on the playground and in the cafeteria. Rates of physical negative behavior decreased in the intervention group, but increased in the control group. As for neutral/prosocial behavior the treatment group saw an increase in these behaviors on the playground and in the cafeteria, while the control group experienced little change.

One study of Second Step looked specifically at perspective taking, a critical component of the cognitive aspect of empathy. This evaluation of the Second Step curriculum (McMahon, et al., 2000) was conducted on preschool and kindergarten children from low-income urban families. Children demonstrated improved social perspective taking skills. Another study (Frey, et al., 2001), also using randomly assigned treatment and control schools, found improved social competence in second through fifth graders.

In summary, Second Step is a violence prevention curriculum that explicitly commits a large portion of its lessons to empathy training. It teaches empathy through modeling, practice, and reinforcement. The majority of the components of empathy, as defined in this article are covered in the curriculum. There is strong empirical evidence that, when implemented as designed, Second Step is an effective violence prevention curriculum for schools.

A wide range of classroom-based affective education curricula are available to today’s educators. Most of these curricula consist of psychoeducational, skills-based approaches where the goal is to teach how to think and not just what to think about social situations and behavior. However, not all curricula are equal in facilitating the development of empathy, a critical foundational social skill. Our task was to highlight five programs that represent a range of innovative classroom curricula designed as promising approaches for promoting empathy and other social competencies. These programs have been successful in reducing a variety of behavior problems in children and improving an array of prosocial and behavioral competencies, including coping, problem-solving, conflict-resolution and resiliency.

Teaching techniques and strategies across curriculum, include:

• a. explicit lessons on key affective vocabulary,

• b. a variety of developmentally appropriate multi-sensory activities and practice experiences,

• c. self-control strategies that help children integrate emotional, communication, and cognitive skills; and

• d. specific ideas to promote the generalization of these skills throughout the school day.

The following explains these techniques and strategies further.

All include lessons on how to express, label and recognize feelings in self and others. These lessons typically include vocabulary development, then small group discussion of affective reactions, and then application of these labels during situational role-plays.

All curricula engage children actively during instruction through the use of modeling, active rehearsal, and behavioral role-play routines. Some recommend that skills under consideration be reinforced explicitly throughout the day during school activities.

All included lessons on the development of conscious self-control strategies that employed motor-inhibiting self-verbalizations and problem-solving self-statements.

All curricula included ideas for how teachers and staff could embed concepts learned in the curriculum across the school day within real-life school contexts and into content areas, such as reading, language arts, science, and social studies. Unfortunately, none of the curricula provide much guidance for how a teacher might accomplish this goal except to stress that empathy and other prosocial skills need to be tied more directly to the academic curriculum.

While many commonalities exist across program content and delivery, the ways in which empathy was addressed varied. In some cases empathy was a specifically stated goal or skill, at other times empathy was subsumed under broader goals and skills. Also, the components of empathy addressed within the curricula varied.

In reviewing these five curricula, our first goal was to determine how well specific content domains associated with empathy were covered. This was important because empathic responding is a complex skill, involving several areas of competence. Overall, the curricula reviewed here focus more heavily on the cognitive aspects of empathy versus the affective aspects. There is a strong focus on helping children take on others’ perspectives. However, because it is the affective aspects of empathy that motivate one to respond prosocially, more emphasis on these skills is needed. Even if one understands the feelings of another, without some emotional response to the other person, there may be no desire help. While cognitive aspects of empathy, such as understanding others, helps us to know how to be helpful, affective responding creates the impetus to be helpful. Thus, future work must consider how well a curriculum engages students in the affective aspects of empathy as well as developing the cognitive processes associated with this important skill.

A second goal of this review was to draw conclusions about the techniques employed across curricula to ensure that these skills were maintained and generalized. All five programs address changes in school climate that, if implemented, would provide many opportunities for generalization. However, school-wide implementation of these programs requires strong support from a large majority of the school staff. Such efforts require ongoing training to ensure that all staff is trained in the underlying principles of the affective education curriculum. Ultimately, the generalization of universal affective education curriculum rests with the adoption of the program philosophy and practices by all core staff. Elias (1987) eloquently suggests that the values, ideas and concepts of any adopted affective education program must be promoted across persons, settings and times. One generalization idea promoted in several curricula is to have a specific time at the beginning and at the end of a day to prompt children to imagine where they might use or to discuss where they did use the specific pro-social skills taught in prior lessons. Another idea to promote generalization is to discuss natural consequences associated with instances of empathic behavior.

Zins, Weissberg, Wang, and Walberg (2003) point to the success of school-based affective education programs that simultaneously focus on educating the child and instilling positive changes in the ecology of the school. There is a great need to create caring and supportive school environments where all adults at the school are committed and involved in affective educational goals (Battistich, Solomon, Watson, & Schaps, 1989).

Selecting a curriculum is only a small step in a large process of promoting empathy. Children must know that empathic responding is valued. Empathy must be modeled for them. Day to day interactions with children may be more critical than the specifics of curricula designed to teach empathy. Most curricula are stronger in the area of cognitive perspective taking than in the area of affective responding. It is difficult to teach someone to respond with similar affect if they have not experienced it themselves. So, while we teach children skills in taking on the perspective of another, it is critical that they experience what it is like to be empathized with. As students experience empathy, they will increase their ability to empathize with others.

A third goal of this review was to focus on the empirical evidence for the effectiveness of these programs. Overall, research on effectiveness is scant and when conducted was most typically conducted by those who had originated the program. Exceptions to this are some of the studies on Second Step (Grossman, et al., 1997; McMahon, et al., 2000), and the study on Bully Proofing currently being conducted by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence. These studies are also strong because they use randomized controlled trials.

In the future, it will be important to conduct more longitudinal studies, since none of the programs have specifically looked at the effect of the curriculum on the long-term development of empathy by following children into middle and high school. This may be due in part to the difficulty in measuring empathy. However, both teacher (Stetson, 1998) and self-ratings (Bryant, 1982) of empathy can be conducted. Ideally, a multimodal approach to measuring changes in empathy would be used, including observations in the classroom and on the playground, as well as self and adult reports in home, community, and school settings.

Another area in need of research is how much parent training and home-school connections enhance school curricula. While most affective education programs include a component involving parents, it is often overlooked or only partially implemented. Involving parents is challenging and time-consuming. Research that documents how much such involvement improves outcome would help school staff determine how much time and energy spent on parent involvement would be worthwhile.

In conclusion, each of the five affective curricula reviewed here has its own merits and distinctiveness in helping to promote empathy. While other affective curricula not reviewed here may lead to similar outcomes, the five selected here reflect the broad availability of affective curricula currently in use in our national schools. It is heartening that each of these curricula have stressed important aspects of empathy. Changes recommended across all curricula include greater attention to the affective components of empathy, how empathy skills can be generalized, and how school-wide and home-school connections can be made to improve effectiveness.

Empathy has been defined as one of the most important self-regulatory aspects of emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1995). If we neglect this crucial aspect of human development, we are denying responsibility for a major part of what makes our students who they are, and we hurt our communities by allowing children with no ability to control their anger or work through their conflict to enter our society as angry, violent adults. Goleman (1995) writes:

Can universal affective education programs be used to promote empathy? The five curricula reviewed here suggest that they can. Still, we are wise to remember that children need to experience empathy themselves, and that affective education is most valuable when it is reflected in the school climate.