PECULIARITIES OF EMPATHY AT DIFFERENT STAGES OF PROFESSIONAL FORMATION OF PRACTICAL PSYCHOLOGISTS OF THE EDUCATION SYSTEM

Abstract

Research on empathy and its changes at different stages of professional development is important for preventing the emotional burnout of specialists, preserving their psychological health. The purpose of our research was to study the features of empathy in practical psychologists of the education system at different their professional formation stages. “Test on empathy determination” by L. Zhuravliova was used to study indicators of empathy empirically. Technique “Professional pathway” by H. Pyroh was applied to find out the peculiarities of the subjective experience of the different professional development stages. The results of the study showed that the most typical empathy level for the education system psychologists is the medium and high levels. Active empathic attitudes related to emotional and effective support dominate among other forms of empathy. Empathy is connected with age –older psychologists have higher overall empathy, however, they are less concerned about the feelings of others. The connection between empathy and work experience is displayed only in the group of “young professionals”. At the beginning of the psychologist's practical professional activity there is a quite intense transformation in the manifestation of empathy towards diminishing its overall expression and increasing of antiempathy. This is explained by changes in the emotional evaluations of professionally significant events, their outcomes, the nature of the difficulties, leading to awareness of one's own problems, and a decrease in empathy. An attitude of psychologists to their profession after a professional adaptation begins to have a less emotional and more “instrumental” character. A high level of empathy is manifested among experienced psychologists who are professionally oriented to other people and have high emotionality. Further research is planned to investigate the connection of the practical psychologists' empathy with the locus of control and to create a program for developing optimal empathy attitudes to prevent emotional burnout.

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