Aysel Akyol and Zeynep Hamamci, The Effect of Drama Education on the Empathetic Skills of University Students

Image courtesy http://www.thebrainandthemind.co.uk/The_Talks/Talk3/

In a 2007 study published in Bulgarian Journal of Science and Education Policy, Volume 1, Number 1,  Akyol and Hamamci (2007) report the results of an experiment investigating the effect of drama education on the empathetic skills of 73 students.  All subjects--36 in the experimental group and 37 in the control group--were undergraduates at Gazi University in Turkey.

In order to contextualize their own experiment, the researchers provided a decent literature review on empathy and drama.  While they noted a paucity in actual research concerning the effect of drama on empathy skills, they also mentioned the following benefits of drama, articulated in psychological and educational literature:

• Drama animates and communicates ideas through collaborative groupwork and creates an environment that fosters ongoing discovery and creativity.
• Through enacting different social problems, participants develop deeper understanding of social roles and social problems.  Actors use real-life experience and knowledge to create an imaginary world where they can investigate relationships and events, even as they're involved in the process of defining situations and characters.
• Drama necessitates that participants put themselves in the place of others, and thus are able to develop understanding of others' feelings and perspectives, building empathetic skills.

All subjects were administered a pre- and post-test, the Empathetic Skills Scale, Form B, to ascertain empathetic skills.  The experimental group received drama education in a weekly four-hour session  for 14 weeks, and there was a statistically significant increase in that group's empathetic skills.  Akyol and Hamamci postulate that the increase may have been due to the intensive role-playing pairwork and peer feedback built into the experimental design.