Impact of Teacher and Classroom Characteristics on Affective Empathy Development in Upper Elementary Students

Abstract

Affective empathy has been shown to positively impact prosocial behavior, buffer against antisocial behavior, and improve school functioning. The present study examined affective empathy and teacher and classroom characteristics in a sample of 822 students in Grades 4 and 5 across two timepoints. Primary aims were to investigate how student empathy changes over the course of a school year, and how it may be affected by student perceptions of teacher-student closeness, teachers ignoring bullying incidents, and anti-bullying classroom norms. Additionally, the study explored potential moderating effects of student gender on the hypothesized relationships. Results showed that empathy decreased from Time 1 to Time 2 similarly in boys and girls, and that student-teacher closeness positively predicted empathy over time in both gender groups. Ignoring bullying incidents negatively predicted empathy in girls only, and the positive relationship between anti-bullying classroom norms and empathy trended toward significance in boys only. These findings indicate that classroom-level microsystem factors, particularly student-teacher relationships, have a marked influence on students’ empathic development. Furthermore, findings have potentially important implications for school-based social-emotional interventions and curricula.