Communication Skills and Empathy of First-Year Students

The work is aimed at determining differences in the distribution of first-year students by levels of empathy in relation to communicative skills, since in the process of developing personal professional qualities in the process of preparing for educational and professional communication, communicative skills and empathy also become relevant. A brief theoretical review of research on communicative skills and emotional experiences as components of personal professional qualities is presented. The results of a mixed empirical study were obtained on a normal sample of defectology students (A<1; E<1). The study involved respondents (N=49) aged 17 to 23 years (M=19,20; SD=1,51). The methods of L. Mikhelson “Test of communicative skills”, A. Mehrabyan and N. Epstein “Diagnostics of the level of polycommunicative empathy” were used as a research tool. The research procedure was carried out through a voluntary online questionnaire. The results indicate the severity of very high and high levels of polycommunicative empathy and competence-based type of communicative behavior in the process of teaching students-defectologists. Intergroup differences in the distribution of respondents with competence-based, dependent and aggressive types of communicative behavior in the process of preparing for educational and professional communication were obtained. It is noted that the manifestation of the competence type of communicative behavior (71,4%) in educational and professional communication and very high (53,1%), high levels (42,9%) of polycommunicative empathy allow us to assert individual differences in the formation of personal professional qualities of students. The empirical data obtained are presented in the light of the communicative-activity approach and explain the statistical differences in the levels of empathy of students in relation to various types of communicative behavior.

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