Infants’ Emotional Reactivity and Their Future Empathic Concern: Parental Beliefs as a Moderator

• In Event: Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Topic - Moral Development

Abstract

Empathy is a key aspect of early sociomoral competence. We now recognize that even young children are sensitive to others’ distress and capable of empathic emotions and actions (Davidov, Zahn-Waxler, Roth-Hanania, & Knafo, 2013; Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Knafo-Noam, 2015; Thompson, 2012).
Early empathy develops within a complex interplay of child early temperament characteristics and qualities of parenting (Cornell & Frick, 2007; Wagers & Kiel, 2019). Although children’s fearfulness and self-regulation have been often considered, little research has examined early differences in infants’ non-specific emotional reactivity to aversive stimulation and their future empathy. This quality may be an antecedent of future difficulty and impoverished empathy. However, it can also predict, in complex ways, aspects of empathy, such as arousal and distress in response to others’ pain (Eisenberg at al., 2015) and empathic concern (Noten, van der Heijden, Huijbregts, van Goozen, & Swaab, 2020). Given this diversity of potential outcomes, qualities of parenting may be especially consequential for highly reactive infants.
Most research on the role of parenting in empathy development has focused on parents’ control or warmth (Eisenberg et al., 2016). Few studies have examined parental representational abilities and beliefs in relation to child emerging empathy, although those abilities have been implicated as predicting related outcomes, including theory of mind, understanding others, and emotion regulation (McMahon & Bernier, 2017).
We examined the role of parents’ dysfunctional representations of their children, an increasingly prominent topic in developmental psychology (Kochanska, Boldt, & Goffin, 2019). We focused on parents’ attributions of hostile intent to their young children (Sturge-Apple et al., 2020). We anticipated that those attributions would moderate associations between infants’ early reactivity and their future empathic concern, such that more reactive infants would become more empathic, but only if their parents demonstrated low levels of dysfunctional representations.
In our longitudinal study of 200 community families, we collected parallel data for mother- and father-child dyads. We observed infants’ emotional reactivity at 7-9 months in episodes that involved brief aversive stimuli (e.g., touched with a cold object; Kochanska, Coy, Tjebkes, & Husarek, 1998), and coded intensity of distress. Parents completed the Child-Responsible scale (Snarr, Slep, & Grande, 2009) that captures parental view of young children’s behavior as intentionally spiteful. We observed children’s empathic concern at 15-17 months in a standard empathy probe (Zahn-Waxler et al. 1991; parent pretends to be hurt by the child during play).
We modeled infants’ reactivity as the predictor, their empathic concern in toddlerhood as the outcome, and parents’ dysfunctional attribution scores as a moderator. For father-child dyads, we supported the expected interaction, F(1, 169) = 8.48, p < .01, B = -0.28, SE = 0.10. Simple slopes indicated that the positive association between infants’ reactivity and future empathy was only significant when fathers’ dysfunctional attributions were low (-1 SD), B = 0.33, SE = 0.10, but not average (0 SD) B = 0.11, SE = 0.07, or high (+1 SD), B = -0.12, SE = 0.10.
We will discuss potential mechanisms accounting for the findings in mother- and father-child dyads.

Authors

• Nicole C. Yeager, University of Iowa
  Presenting Author

• Danming An, Lehigh University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Robin J Campbell, University of Iowa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rochelle Praska, University of Iowa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Grazyna Kochanska, University of Iowa
  Non-Presenting Author