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Campus life is, undeniably, a hectic and stressful phenomenon. Students, having an effective learning support system in a compassionate environment and/or a non-stressful learning process will understand more and perform better in their studies. This paper presents the ‘domino effects’ of a joint-project named SOULs — Stress-Out Students Learning Support System, between two subject classes, namely: Psychoeducational Consultation and Collaboration (EDGC 3006) for the 3rd year counselling students, and the Leadership Management Skills class (CCLM 2020) consisting of the 1st years students from various disciplines. This study, employed the Empathy Model in addressing the capacity to understand and react towards the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of others, that allows us to perceive another’s point of view by resonating with their emotions. This model, as mapped by Yalcin and DiPaola (2019), consist of three components of: 1) emotional communication competence, 2) emotion regulation, and 3) cognitive mechanism. The attitude of empathy among counsellors help students to understand their issues and make them feel ‘being understood.’ Yu and Chao (2018) suggested the cognitive and effective empathy are interdependent. This was perceived seen from a counsellor’s empathic behaviour, where the cognitive mechanism in the Empathy Model is much higher than the cognitive empathy ability that seemed to be at par with the altruistic behaviour of a counsellor: “to be able to understand and help a client.” Thus, the researchers were able to establish the project as beneficial for students to have a learning support system, where they can talk and discuss about their issues, regarding their studies, family, career and so forth to the counselling students, who are ‘psycho-socially skilful’ to help students to have a better study skill and stress coping strategies. Simultaneously, they are also aware and keen to act together to find professional help in order to have a quality life where they feel accepted and understood, thereby impacting the level of empathy process. Here is where the connections between affective and cognitive empathy may have influences on each other. Yu and Chao (2018) highlighted that, there may be modulation from the lower route to higher route where human ability to mentalize others depend on whether we have shared their feelings. On the other hand, a modulation from the higher route to lower route, may exist, for instance, when we fully know about others’ minds, we probably can be abler to know others’ feelings.
Keywords: Empathy Model, effective learning support system, psycho-socially skilful, domino effects, resonate, modulation.
