Crying Babies, Empathic Toddlers, Responsive Mothers and Fathers: Exploring Parent-Toddler Interactions in an Empathy Paradigm

• In Event: 1-202 - Windows into early empathy and emotion regulation

Integrative Statement

Early empathy underpins children’s developing social competencies and is, in turn, facilitated by parental socialization. However, existing measures of empathy lack ecological validity, as the majority rely on rating toddlers’ reactions to simulated adult distress. To address this issue, the current study applied home observations of 162 parent-toddler dyads (89 = mother-toddler, 73 = father-toddler, toddler Mage = 24.29 months, SD = .85 months) to examine quasi-naturalistic responses to a crying baby. We capitalized on the inclusion of both fathers and mothers to investigate the effect of the gender composition of the parent-toddler dyad, in addition to examining individual differences in several related measures of empathic responses,.
Video coding of toddlers’ attention toward the crying baby, emotion labelling, personal distress, prosocial behavior and overall empathic concern revealed marked variation in toddlers’ responses to the crying baby (see table). In addition, girls were more likely than boys to provide an emotion label for the crying baby (58% girls vs 33% boys), X2 = 10.71, p = .001,  = .258, p = .001. Further variation in toddler responses was partly explained by the gender composition of the parent-toddler dyad. In particular, levels of overall empathy were higher for girls observed with fathers than for girls observed with mothers (see figure).
Parents’ responses to their toddlers were largely based on toddler behavior, and parent responses did not vary by parent gender. Independent t-tests showed no significant difference between the duration of mothers’ and fathers’ talk to their toddler (p = .173), or frequencies of either asking questions (p = .285), or talking to their toddler about helping the baby (p = .859). Parents’ comments and questions about baby’s emotions were only related with toddlers’ own instances of emotion labelling, r = .20, p = .012, whereas parent talk about helping the baby was only significantly associated with toddlers’ spontaneous prosocial behaviour, r = .28 p < .001, and toddlers’ overall empathic concern, r = .24, p = .003. These findings will be discussed in the context of the development of empathy and parental socialization.
In order to continue investigating the psychometric properties of the crying baby paradigm and the developmental progress of empathy, the paradigm is being used in either the home or a nursery setting when the same children are 36-months old. Preliminary results (N = 42; sample subset) for this follow-up show partial associations with the 24-month results. When controlling for the location of the visit, children who showed more prosocial behavior at 24-months also showed greater empathic responsivity to the baby (r = .286, p = .059) and those who had higher empathic concern at 24-months also showed greater empathic concern at 36-months (r = .307, p = .043). More detailed coding and analysis of the full sample will be completed and discussed. This analysis will include investigation of stability of individual differences and overall developmental trends, as well as a thorough discussion of how location might affect the validity and reliability of the paradigm.

Authors

• Gabrielle G McHarg, University of Cambridge
  Presenting Author

• Elian Fink, University of Cambridge
  Non-Presenting Author

• Claire Hughes, University of Cambridge
  Non-Presenting Author