The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of theme-oriented group art therapy for
attention and empathy of adolescence. From a pool of 496 all the junior high school students who completed the Korean version of the BEES as part of battery of tests given in testing sessions, 30 individuals(10 in experimental group, 10 in comparative group, and 10 in control group) who scored below -1.0 Zscore were contacted and scheduled as participants. The experimental group and comparative group were presented pointillism mandala which was the same theme for enhancement of attention concentration. For enhancement of empathy, experimental group was conducted theme-oriented group art therapy, and comparative group was conducted reading activity which was a kind of emotional empathy training. To obtain the empirical data, the following instruments were used; FAIR(attention test), Victims Evaluation Scale, and K-BEES. The results are as follows; First, themeoriented group art therapy showed the positive effect that increase the level of attention. Particularly, there are no significant differences between experimental group and comparative group in attention scores. Therefore I concluded that pointillism mandala as the theme-oriented approach is effective to enhancement of attention overall. Second, theme-oriented group art therapy had a positive effect on the level of empathic arousal and empathy. Thus the fact that this study are centered on theme which consider the characteristics and issues of adolescence is of significance. Defining empathy as emotional aspect than cognitive aspect, this study also has great implications to the future empathy study direction. Finally, the limitations of this study and suggestions for future study were discussed.
Key Words : Empathy, Attention, Adolescence, Pointillism mandala, Group art therapy