Empatía y empatía histórica. Su correlación a través de un dilema ético

Abstract

Psychological empathy is an area under addressed in teacher training, but is essential for understanding the historical past and its teaching. Therefore, the aim of this research is to reveal whether psychological empathy favours the development of historical thinking skills in a sample of 164 future History teachers in compulsory education. We propose a correlational study, in didactic research, which tries to delimit the degree of association between the psychological and the understanding of History. In order to achieve this objective, firstly, the values of psychological empathy are probed, from its affective and cognitive perspective. Next, the exploration of historical empathy is approached through the implementation of a research practice, focused on our recent history and the development of didactic strategies for the adoption of another perspective. Finally, the values brought forth from the intervention in the field of History are compared with those obtained in the exploratory psychological study. The final results show, on the one hand, that the cognitive scores of psychological empathy are significantly higher than the affective scores of the construct. On the other hand, they indicate that the work with didactic strategies places the sample of university students at intermediate levels of historical empathy. Finally, it is concluded that there is no significant association between the two study variables, with the correlational analysis revealing a disagreement between the psychological and the historical.