Empathy through Art Therapy

I have been facilitating a group using Art Therapy to help promote emotional awareness, expression, and empathy in sex offenders. My recent presentations have been on this topic. I use the Interpersonal Reactivity Index which is an instrument given to the patients at the beginning of the 12 week group and then at the end. There are 28 items to the instrument and the items cover 4 subgroups. The most promising results are in the area of Personal Distress. High levels of personal distress indicate that a person may be so focused on their own distress, that they can't attend to another's distress. So, a decrease in personal distress is positive. Each group session, the patients are asked to create art work on a different topic. Some of them have a hard time even identifying feelings and some do not understand what empathy is. The directives include topics that cover accessing their feelings and feeling empathy for others. I usually start off with a directive like, "Create an image about what empathy means to you," or "Make an image about a time you felt empathy for someone." Sometimes they are asked to do a directive on victim empathy. This group and these directives can also be used with juvenile sex offenders, inmates, or any other population that might benefit from increased empathy.