| 其他摘要 | Empathy, the ability to understand other’s psychological state and share others’ feelings, is crucial to maintain our physical and mental health and promote interpersonal communications. Previous studies showed that empathy could predict the occurrence of prosocial behaviors, which can further increase individual’s self-esteem and self-satisfaction, thus promoting the harmonious development in our society. Therefore, how to improve empathy and promote prosocial behaviors is an important research topic in the field of developmental and educational psychology.With the formation of the concepts of “self” and “others”, young children start to show some empathy related behaviors. Besides, the development of empathy is demonstrated to be affected by individual factors (such as genes, neurodevelopment, and temperament) and social factors (such as parental style and parental relationship). These findings suggested the possibility of improving empathy by external intervention. Indeed, previous studies showed that long-term music training had a positive impact on empathy and prosocial behaviors. In other words, music training is one of the effective approaches to improve empathy. However, it is unclear whether other music-related training (e.g., dance training) can also achieve the same effect of improving empathy as music training. In addition, it is unclear whether such an effect of music-related training could selectively affect people at a certain age stage.To address these questions, the present study systematically investigated the impact of music-related training (music training and dance training) on individual empathy at different age stages (adolescents and adults). Specifically, Study 1 used questionnaires to explore the impact of music training on empathy and prosocial behaviors for junior middle school students. The results showed that there were positive correlations between music training and the empathy scores as well as prosocial behavior scores in this group, suggesting that music training could promote the empathy for adolescents. Study 2 also used questionnaires to investigate the influence of music training at adolescent stage on empathy for adults and collected the brain structural image data to explore the underlying structural neural basis. The results showed that music training has no correlation with empathy scores and no correlation with empathy-related brain regions. In study 3, adult ballroom dancers and adult nondancers were recruited, and empathy-related questionnaires and brain structural image data were collected. The results showed that there was a significant difference in the Empathic Concern subcomponent in the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) between dancers and nondancers. Besides, there were significant correlations between dance training and the Fantasy, Empathic Concern, and Personal Distress subcomponents in the IRI. Moreover, significant correlations were observed between dance training and the grey matter volume of empathy-related brain regions. These results suggested that professional dance training could affect individual’s empathy and modulate the empathy-related brain structure.In summary, with the help of three studies, we provided evidence from different aspects showing that both long-term music training and dance training could have a positive impact on empathy. This positive impact was not only supported by evidence at the behavioral level, but also by evidence at the neural level, reflected as the significant alternations in the grey matter volume of empathy-related brain regions. However, such a positive impact cannot be maintained for a long period. The effect of music training at adolescent stage on empathy cannot last to adult stage. Therefore, our study demonstrated the important but unsustainable influences of different training strategies, i.e., music training and dance training, on the development of empathy, thus providing theoretical basis and practical strategies for improving empathy and prosocial behaviors. |
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