Identificação de sentimentos e desempenho empático em crianças cegas e videntes: um estudo comparativo e multimodal

Abstract

Visually impaired children present preoccupying characteristics for the social skills repertoire given their difficulty on identifying feelings and, consequently, the compromising of their empathic social skills. The increase of these children's inclusion in the regular teaching and the positive correlation among a socially competent repertoire and academic success justifies the need to characterize that repertoire as a base for the planning of studies in that area. Considering these issues, this study evaluated the empathic social skills of blind children and their differences or similarities to sighted children, in terms of: (a) Identification of other s feelings, based on contextual and paralinguistic verbal tracks; (b) Relationship between auditory feelings identification and self-evaluation, evaluation by significant ones and observable empathic performance; (c) Observable social performance in the presence of empathy demands; (d) Relationship between the observable empathic performance and the empathic performance rated by the child (self-evaluation) and other significant ones; (e) Comparison between results obtained through different instruments and appraisers. Participants were 16 children with medical diagnosis of blindness and 16 sighted children, age between seven and 10, as well as their parents and teachers. The instruments used in the data collection were: Questionnaire of the Behavioral Indicators of Empathy in Children answered by teachers and parents/responsible; Infantile histories recorded in audio; Interview itinerary on the histories; Structured situation for empathic behavior observation; Protocol for the Empathic Behavior Observation; Social Skills Rating System (SSRS-BR). Data analysis was accomplished through descriptive and inferential statistics and aimed to characterize the two groups considering the empathic skill, feelings identification, self-evaluation and evaluation by other significant ones. Results indicate that there was only significant difference between the feelings identification of the blind children's groups and seers for emotion discrimination of the paralinguistic aspects in speech and the highest scores in happiness and the lowest scores in rage, for both groups. In the data about empathy evaluation, so much for the direct observation (structured situation), as for the methods of the parents' reports, teachers and child himself/herself, there were not found significant differences among the groups, what suggests a consistence in the evaluation of that skill by different informers and instruments. Intra-group comparison of the empathy scores for the blind children group and seers group pointed to no significant difference among the evaluations accomplished by the parents and teachers for each group, in other words, there was a coherence in the perception of the children's empathic skill. Those groups, blind and seers, therefore, presented larger number of similarities than differences in the empathic repertoire and of feelings identification