The effect of the psychoeducation program applied to 2nd grade primary school on their empathy and emotion regulation skills

The purpose of this research; to analyze the effect of the "psychoeducation program" on the empathy and emotion regulation skill levels of 2nd grade primary school students. In the 2022-2023 academic year, a research project was conducted with 2ndgrade primary school students in a state school located in the Fatih district of Istanbul, Turkey. This study employed an experimental design based on a pre-test-post-test model with experimental and control groups. Initially, 208 students were assessed using the "Empathy Scale for Children" and the "Emotion Regulation Scale". Following the analysis, 22 students were assigned to the experimental group and 16 to the control group through a random assignment method to ensure balanced groups. During the research process, a psychosocial education program was implemented as the experimental intervention, consisting of approximately 40 minutes per session over 10 sessions. The primary aim of the research is to test the effectiveness of the psychosocial education program in enhancing students' empathy and emotion regulation skills. Therefore, the independent variable of the study is the group psychosocial education program applied to the experimental group. The dependent variables are the levels of empathy and emotion regulation skills among the students. Data on the dependent variables were assessed using the "Empathy Scale for Children (ESC)" and the "Emotion Regulation Scale (ERS)" in this study. ESC consists of 20 items, while ERS consists of 24 items and two sub-factors. To test the significance of differences between groups, the Mann Whitney U test was utilized, while the Wilcoxon Signed- Rank test was employed to assess the significance of differences between measurements. The research found that the group psychosocial education program applied to students with low empathy and emotion regulation skills was effective in enhancing the empathy and emotion regulation skills of the participants in the study group.