Young Children’s Affective Responses to Another’s Distress: Affective Empathy, Cognitive Empathy and Social Behaviour

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

Integrative Statement

Given the widely held assertion that affective empathy is related to children’s social behaviour, in the current study we examined the association between children’s affective responses to an empathy-eliciting event, and their cognitive empathy and social behaviour in order to help unpack the meaning of these distinct affective responses.
Participants were 114 children (Mage = 67 months; SD = 5.0 months) in their first year of formal schooling, observed and assessed over three sessions. Affective empathy was assessed as children watched a short video-vignette depicting a real child expressing distress at his parent’s departure on his first day of school (Fink et al., 2015). This vignette was chosen to elicit empathic responses because of the strong distress signals emitted by the protagonist and the familiar school setting. The cognitive empathy task required children to both take the psychological perspective of another and share his/her emotional response (Strayer & Roberts, 1993). In addition, teachers reported on children’s dispositional empathy (Findlay et al., 2006) and their positive social behaviours. Children’s verbal ability was controlled in all analyses.
Results showed that 29% of children expressed sadness, 31% showed interest-worry with the remaining 40% of children inexpressive when witnessing another’s distress. There was a systematic association between children’s affective responses to another’s distress and both dispositional empathy and social behaviour, such that those children expressing sadness were more likely to be rated by teachers as having greater empathy and more positive social behaviour compared to children expressing interest-worry. Interestingly, affective responses to another’s distress were unrelated to children’s cognitive empathy, although both affective empathy and cognitive empathy independently predicted both dispositional empathy (R2 = .09*) and social behaviour (R2 = .20**).
Overall, the findings presented here strongly suggest that affective responses to another’s distress meaningfully distinguished children, despite being unrelated to children’s cognitive empathy. Importantly, affective responses to a short empathy-eliciting event provided a meaningful window into children’s social behaviour. Implications of these results for both the measurement and conceptualisation of empathy in young children will be discussed.

Authors

• Elian Fink, University of Cambridge
  Presenting Author

• Gabrielle G McHarg, University of Cambridge
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marc de Rosnay, University of Wollongong
  Non-Presenting Author