Disentangling Sympathy and Empathy in Middle Childhood: Evidence From a Novel Task

• In Event: 3-229 - The Role of Middle Childhood in Social-Cognitive Development: New Evidence From Behavioral and Neural Studies

Integrative Statement

Empathy is an emotional response similar to another’s emotion (Uzefosky & Knafo-Noam, 2015). Sympathy is an emotional response of sorrow or concern stemming from cognitive apprehension of another’s condition (Eisenberg, 2000). Although theoretically distinct, the attempts to empirically differentiate between empathy and sympathy have proven to be difficult, and their possibly separate developmental courses have not been investigated. To bridge this gap, we developed a task which differentiates empathy from sympathy without asking participants to explicitly describe these complex constructs. We asked children to report on their feelings after presenting emotional stories about protagonists’ general vulnerable status (e.g., a child with a disability), followed by descriptions of specific neutral, sad, or happy events that happened to the protagonists. The rationale is that in stories where the general status elicits sadness, but the current situation elicits neutral/happy emotions, feeling sadness indicates sympathy, not empathy. In contrast, feelings of happiness (i.e., feeling what the protagonist felt) are indicators of empathy.

In two separate experiments, 5-10 years old children (divided into three age groups) watched cartoon stories as exemplified in Figure 2.1. Experiment 1 examined emotional understanding. After each story, children (n=118) described how the protagonist felt and rated the protagonist’s happiness and sadness. In Experiment 2 (n=140), which examined emotional responses, children answered how they themselves felt. Children’s ratings were analyzed with mixed 3(event)X 3(age group) ANOVA.

In experiment 1, children of all ages considered the general status of the protagonist more than the current event. In the happy and neutral events, 68.1% and 84.6% of the children, respectively, freely described the protagonist’s emotion as negative, even though the protagonist was not experiencing a negative concurrent event. However, children also considered the protagonist’s current emotion: children of all ages rated the protagonist as happier in the happy event compared to the sad, t(89)=5.76, p<.0001, and neutral events, t(89)=4.96, p<.0001. Experiment 2 yielded an age X event interaction, F(3.68,250.47)=2.43, p=.053, ηp²=.03 (sphericity correction) (Figure 2.2). Younger children (5-6 years) rated themselves as happier in the happy, t(36)=2.74, p=.010, and neutral events, t(36)=1.93, p=.063, compared to the sad event. In contrast, older children (7-10 years) rated themselves as happier in the happy event, whereas the sad and neutral events had no difference (similar pattern, albeit weaker, emerged for the sadness ratings). Thus, children of all ages showed empathy, as indicated by the difference in emotion ratings between the happy and sad events. Older children exhibited more sympathy compared to younger children, as indicated by feeling less happy when only general vulnerability (but no current emotion) was presented. Importantly, Experiment 1 suggests that this did not result from younger children’s lower memory or understanding abilities, since they understood and remembered the general status’ negative nature.

This experimental design enables detecting differences between empathy and sympathy and provides initial evidence that sympathy to general vulnerability develops during middle childhood, after empathy to current emotions. These findings suggest that as children grow, they integrate broader contexts about others, and that these contexts affect their emotions toward them.

Authors

• Lior Abramson, Hebrew university of Jerusalem
  Presenting Author

• Florina Uzefovsky, Ben Gurion University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ariel Knafo-Noam, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  Non-Presenting Author