This study establishes the nature of appropriate support for infants’ imaginative expressive drawing activities and the perspective of their improvement based on the mechanism of empathy. Therefore, we first took a general view of the current state and issues of research surrounding empathy. Then, we interpreted the results of empathy based particularly on a multidimensional view and investigated an example of infants’ imaginative expressive drawing activities.
In this example, the nursery teachers’ encouragement promoted infants’ “perspective taking” of becoming a lion and their “fantasy” of immersing themselves in an imaginary world. We found that their “personal distress,” which treats the lion’s pain as their own pain, and their helping behavior were evoked on the basis of their altruism, i.e., their “empathic concern” or their feeling of “I want to make the lion feel better.”
In the infants’ drawing activities, they developed helping behavior for the lion while they were playing imagination games. In this manner, it was possible for the nursery teachers to introduce the infants’ drawing activities as enjoyable play activities in the imaginary world. They could do this by thoroughly understanding the effect of infants’ empathy and by appealing to the infants appropriately.
However, we have only investigated one example in this study. The existence of other dimensions is also possible in other examples. Given the latest results in empathy research based on the multidimensional view, a wider range of cases needs to be more precisely examined.
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