Poster #125 - Empathic Understanding in Early Childhood: Children's Responses to Sadness, Anger, and Shame

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

Researchers differ in their definitions of empathy, primarily regarding whether it involves cognitive understanding of emotions and/or an ability to feel with or for another (Brown, 2006; Eisenberg, 2000; Tangney. 1991). In order to better understand these relations, the present study examines young children’s ability to identify the affective responses one child would have to another child’s emotions.

Children begin showing empathic responses in infancy; however, empathic/prosocial skills develop for many years (Tully, Donohue, & Garcia, 2015; Willis, 2016). Moreover, empathic understanding predicts prosocial behavior (Roberts, Strayer, & Denham, 2017; Van Zonneveld et al., 2017). Despite the importance of empathy and prosocial behavior, little is known about children’s awareness of empathic responses to specific emotions. Yet, the ability to be empathic when a peer is angry could reduce interpersonal aggression. Moreover, there has been almost no research on preschoolers’ understanding of shame in self or others.

This study examines preschool-aged children’s understanding of sadness, anger, and shame in the protagonist (“self”) and an observing friend (“other”) (n = 54). Using an adapted version of Denham’s Affective Knowledge Test (1986), research assistants asked children aged 38 to 66 months (M = 49 months) to identify the emotion a puppet (self) would experience in a scenario and to identify the emotion a puppet’s friend (other) would experience in the same scenario.

Preliminary analyses showed no significant effects of age in months on emotion understanding scores, so age was omitted as a covariate. Paired samples t-tests comparing children’s understanding of different emotions showed significant differences between understanding of sadness versus anger and shame, and of anger versus shame, in both self and other (see Table 1). Interestingly, there were also significant moderate and high correlations among understanding of others’ responses to all emotions, suggesting that children possessing greater empathic understanding for one emotion are more likely to possess it toward another. Findings show that children expressed greatest understanding of sadness, followed by anger, and then shame, both in self and others; however, children showed some understanding even of how a friend would feel when one experienced a shame-inducing situation. These findings highlight the potential importance of teaching children how to recognize and respond in adaptive ways to anger and shame in self and others. Although current socioemotional competence interventions usually teach children how to regulate their own anger, they rarely teach children how to regulate their own sadness or shame or to respond empathically to peers’ anger and shame. Further research is needed with such interventions.

Authors

• Mallory Alise Kisner, Colorado State University
  Presenting Author

• Karen Barrett, Colorado State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Pei-Jung Wang, Colorado State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Katherine Higgins, Colorado State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tim Bautista-Johnston, Colorado State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Coombs, Colorado State University
  Non-Presenting Author