Effectiveness of self-effacing empathy training in adolescents and their parents: a randomized controlled study

Improving the quality of an adolescent-parent relationship and their interactions is associated with better adolescent mental health, and is a key target for preventative interventions aimed at reducing the risk of a mental disorder. Empathy is a crucial aspect in improving these interactions with implications for longer-lasting and more rewarding relationships later on. The effectiveness of interventions specifically designed to improve empathy conjointly in adolescents and their parents, to our knowledge, have not been studied in a controlled way before. Nor have empathy interventions previously targeted the self-effacing aspects of empathy in which the experiences of the other person feature principally. This study reports the effectiveness of self-effacing empathy training over eight weeks among adolescents and their parents. A randomised controlled parallel design was followed in examining the effects of the self-effacing empathy training on empathy outcome measures among 112 participants. Fifty-six adolescent-parent dyads were randomized to a self-effacing empathy training and a control group. These groups were compared statistically for both adolescents and parents in the primary analysis, supported by before-after comparisons. Both groups received weekly instructions by e-mail regarding their respective tasks that they were required to execute on their own and submit a report. The self-effacing empathy training comprised guided individual and conjoint reflections on interpersonal events as captured in selected video-clips, executed twice weekly over an eight-week period. The adolescents and parents in the self-effacing empathy training group improved significantly in comparison with the control group on the Self-effacing Empathy Scale (MWU = 18, z = 9.038, p < .001) and the Basic Empathy Scale (MWU = 18, z = 9.038, p < .001) with large effect sizes. Across 16 time points, empathic engagement and mindful engagement in doing the training tasks increased, and difficulty with empathetic task engagement decreased, most markedly so around the half-way mark. Self-effacing empathy training may strengthen empathy among adolescents and their parents. This effect should be investigated further for its duration after the studied eight-week period, and whether replicated in other contexts and with different control conditions.