The comparison of effectiveness of empathy training and social perspective-taking training on social cognition of adolescents with cyber bullying

The purpose of this study was to comparison of effectiveness of empathy training and social perspective-taking training on social cognition of adolescents with cyber bullying. This experimental study was conducted with a pretest-posttest design with control group and follow-up one month. The statistical population of this study included all the female students high school in Bushehr city in year academic 2018-2019 and 45 student were considered as the sample size in two experimental groups (each group of 15 student) and control (15 student). The experimental groups underwent empathy training (10 sessions 90 minutes) and social perspective-taking training (10 sessions 90 minutes), but the control group received no training and remained in the waiting list. To collect data cyber bullying questionnaire of Antoniadou, Kokkinos and Markos (2016) and social cognition questionnaire of Nejati, Kamari and Jafari (2018). Data analysis was performed using SPSS-24 software in two sections: descriptive and inferential (analysis of variance with repeated measures and Bonferroni). The results of the study showed that both types of treatment in post-test and follow up had a significant effect on social cognition of adolescents with cyber bullying (p < 0.05).  Also, social perspective-taking training had stronger effects than empathy training in improvement of social cognition (p < 0.05). Based on the results of this study, it can be said that social perspective-taking training and empathy training can be used as a treatment to improvement of social cognition in educational and therapeutic settings.