Programa de desenvolvimento da empatia em crianças e adolescentes com Síndrome de Asperger

• Autor(a) principal: Barros, Patricia de Souza
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UERJ
• Texto Completo: http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/handle/1/15195
• topic: Empathy; Autism; Autismo; Síndrome de Asperger; Empatia; CNPQ::CIENCIAS HUMANAS::PSICOLOGIA

Empathy, looked at in a multidimensional concept, comprises a triad of components (cognitive, affective and behavioral) that seem to be mutually influenced throughout the socioemotional development, making it possible for the children to understand somebody else's perspective, this way they mobilize themselves emotionally (based on this perspective), and thus react behaving according to the context. Taking this into consideration, the empathy atypical operation generates significant trouble and loss in the social field. This is what happens with those who are diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome: the development of such skills does not take place in a spontaneous and natural way. So, the current study aims at building up and evaluating a program towards the development of empathy among children and adolescents diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome (SA). The main objective was to improve this capacity by teaching the strategies focusing on the development of the cognitive component, such as the perspective taking and mental flexibility. Furthermore, its structure counted on a set of various tools that were applied in group. The sample was comprised of 46 children and adolescents (44 boys and 2 giris) ranging from 8 to 17 years old, diagnosed with AS according to the DSM-IV-TR criteria. The participants were evaluated before and after the intervention, as well as 30 days afterwards. Empathic skills were evaluated through a list of behaviors, built up from data retrieved from Literature. Parents and teachers considered every single item of the list based on the behavior of the participant, observed in different social contexts. Concerning the evaluation method, the participants watched snippets of films (that required the identification of basic and complex emotions) so as to measure their abilities in the cognitive and affective aspects of empathy. Moreover, the participants' behaviors were recorded during free interactions in three different moments along the intervention sessions. Simultaneously, parents also took part in group sessions, in which they were performed about the disorder, and also oriented towards communication strategies to stimulate the development of empathy in their kids. The results showed significant improvement in the empathic behaviors considering the parents', teachers' and trained judges? perspective. Besides, improvement was noticed in the cognitive and alfective components of empathy towards the identification of complex and basic emotions. Needless to say that the improvement continued showing results throughout the segment evaluation in the cognitive aspect towards identification of basic emotions. These results agree with data collected from previous studies, which suggest that the cognitive development of empathy is intrinsically related to the improvement of other components (affective and behavioral), becoming widespread in various social contexts of these individuals.