Conflicts are an integral part of communications, both interpersonal and professional, it can be both constructive and destructive. It depends on many factors, primarily on the participants’ proneness to conflict and empathy. The presented scientific problem is important because empathy is important for resolving of professional conflicts and reducing their participants’ proneness to conflict, and because of еру peculiarities of penitentiary service employees’ professional training.

The article purpose is to present the theoretical and empirical study on links between proneness to conflict and empathy in the personality structure of military student – future penitentiary service employees.

Empathy is a systemic formation that includes cognitive, emotional and conative components, and the full empathic process includes three stages: empathy, compassion and assistance. Proneness to conflict is an individual’s property characterized by a certain mental activity, certain emotions, thoughts, intentions, attitudes, etc., motivating the individual’s conflict behaviour.

There were inverse correlations between the respondents’ proneness to conflict and their general ability to empathize; between their proneness to conflict and indicators of empathy and empathy channels, attitudes promoting empathy, identification (as an important empathy mechanism) and the penetrating force of empathy. An inverse correlation was also determined for proneness to conflict and emotional and predicative empathy.

We have concluded that special psychological technologies for empathy development should be developed to overcome military student-future penitentiary service employees’ proneness to conflict with the purpose to increase the effectiveness of their professional communications and work efficiency. This will be the direction of our further research projects.

Key words: conflict, proneness to conflict, a problem personality, empathy, professional communication.

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