Foundations of Children's Sympathy: Emotion Recognition and Regulation

• In Event: Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Topic - Moral Development

Abstract

Although the behavioral outcomes of sympathy—feeling sorrow or concern for another’s distress or misfortune—are well established (e.g., prosocial behaviors; Malti et al., 2012; van Noorden et al., 2015), its foundations (i.e., the reasons why some children are more sympathetic than others at any given point in time and across development) are not yet fully understood. Past research has found that children’s abilities to recognize and regulate distress-related emotions are important for their development of sympathy and may thus serve as underlying mechanisms of sympathy (e.g., Eisenberg, 2000; Rieffe et al., 2010; Vaish et al., 2009). However, no research thus far has examined these social-emotional processes simultaneously to account for their relative and potential interactive contributions to sympathy. Additionally, research has not clearly disentangled the relative importance of recognizing and regulating different distress-related emotions, such as sadness and anger, for children’s sympathy. In order to support children’s development of sympathy, it is vital that we understand which underlying mechanisms are most important.

To address these gaps, we used multi-group regression analyses to predict an ethnically diverse sample of 4- and 8-year-olds’ (N = 300, n = 150 per group; 50% female) sympathy from their sadness and anger recognition and regulation, first overall and then separately for each age group. We focused on 4- and 8-year-olds because our constructs of interest significantly increase between early and middle childhood (e.g., Gao & Maurer, 2010; Goodman & Thompson, 2010; Waters & Thompson, 2014). To measure emotion recognition, children participated in a facial morph task for which they were presented five houses labeled with emoticons and asked to sort pictures of real sad and angry faces of varying intensity into their respective “home” (Gao & Maurer, 2009). Children also responded to well-validated sadness regulation, anger regulation, and sympathy scales (Eisenberg et al., 1996; Zeman et al., 2001).

Across age, higher sadness and anger regulation independently predicted higher levels of sympathy (Table 1). However, multigroup analyses revealed that this was only the case for 4-year-olds; only anger regulation predicted sympathy in 8-year-olds (Table 2). Interactions of recognition and regulation on sympathy were not significant.

These findings provide support for a general role of emotion regulation in younger children’s sympathy. As children get older and their emotion regulation capacities improve, being particularly good at regulating anger—a notoriously difficult emotion to regulate—may be a better indicator of emotion regulation and corresponding benefits in sympathy than sadness regulation would. Individual differences in emotion recognition may be less pivotal for children’s sympathetic concern.

Authors

• Emma Galarneau, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Tyler John Colasante, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tina Malti, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author