Burkinshaw, of Germantown, Md. The findings reflect a major expansion in researchers' understanding of cognitive growth during adolescence, according to a research review co-authored by Ronald Dahl, a professor of public health at the University of California at Berkeley. Researchers used to believe that both forms of empathy were fully formed during childhood. Now, it's clear that "the brain regions that support social cognition, which helps us understand and interact with others successfully, continue to change dramatically" in the teens, says Jennifer Pfeifer, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon in Eugene.
Preliminary research in her lab also suggests cognitive empathy rises in teens. The discoveries serve as a new lens for exploring such teen behaviors as bullying and drug abuse. Kids who develop affective and cognitive empathy form healthy relationships and argue less with their parents, research shows. Perspective-taking continues to be central for adults on the job, helping in designing and selling products and services, building user-friendly devices, and working smoothly with others with diverse viewpoints and backgrounds.
Affective empathy is grounded in the limbic region of the brain, which regulates emotions. This capacity begins developing in infancy when parents respond sensitively to babies' emotions.
Children learn to practice empathy by watching their parents and by experiencing it themselves—being treated well by adults who respond warmly to their feelings, says Anthony Wolf, a Longmeadow, Mass. Cognitive empathy arises from a different part of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, which continues developing later, through adolescence. But the two are linked; children's affective empathy predicts their level of cognitive empathy as teens, says a forthcoming study by Caspar Van Lissa, a doctoral candidate at Utrecht's adolescent-research center.
Parents can help instill affective empathy by encouraging children to walk in others' shoes. If Ms. Burkinshaw's kids saw a child being teased or treated badly, she asked them, "If that had been you, what would you have wanted your friends to do to help? Her year-old daughter Alexandra recently told her that several classmates had hurt another girl's feelings by blocking her from following them on Instagram. Burkinshaw says. Alexandra talked with her friends, and another mother also intervened.
The initial version of the EmQue-CA consisted of 21 items generated by the second author and had three scales: 1 affective empathy nine items; e. Participants were asked to rate to what extent the description was true for them on a 3-point scale: 1 not true, 2 somewhat true, and 3 true Pouw et al. All questions were re scored such that higher scores reflect higher empathy.
Mean scores were calculated per scale. TABLE 3. Two scales of the IRI Davis, were obtained from different subsamples of this study: empathic concern e. Both scales contained six items; each item was rated on a 5-point Likert scale with 0 completely untrue, 1 not quite true, 2 in between, 3 quite true and 4 completely true. All questions were re scored such that higher scores reflected higher empathy.
Three scales of the well validated EAQ were included in a subsample of this study Rieffe et al. All items were answered on a 3-point scale with 1 not true, 2 sometimes true, 3 often true. We used an adapted version of the FQS Bukowski et al. Participants were asked to indicate how much each item was true for their relationship with their best friend on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 not true to 5 completely true. Considering the strong links between positive friendship quality and empathy Meuwese et al.
Mean scores were calculated and higher scores indicated higher relationship quality. Mean scores of the six bullying items were used; higher scores indicated more engagement in bullying behavior. In order to assess the construct validity of the EmQue-CA, we randomly split the total sample in two. To determine the number of factors to be retained parallel analysis was used Horn, In parallel analysis, multiple datasets are randomly generated that equal the original dataset in terms of sample size and number of items.
Eigenvalues obtained from the sample data are compared to eigenvalues obtained from the random datasets. Eigenvalues of the sample data bigger than their random counterpart are retained, ensuring that a factor explains more variance than is expected based on chance. In this study, random data sets were generated. Oblimin rotation with Kaiser normalization was used since factors were assumed to be correlated. On the second half of the sample a Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to test the final model as derived by the previous PCA, using EQS version 6.
All items were hypothesized to load on their key factor; no cross-loadings or error covariances were allowed. The concurrent validity of the EmQue-CA was also tested, for which we examined the associations between the EmQue-CA scales with emotion awareness, friendship quality, and bullying behavior.
A PCA on all 21 items was performed using the first half of the sample. In addition, KMO values for individual items had sampling adequacy coefficients ranging from 0. To extract the suitable number of factors, an initial PCA analysis was conducted. The parallel analysis indicated that four factors should be retained. The four factors together explained Exploring the content of the items within the factors it was noted that three factors clearly represented the three hypothesized theoretical constructs: 1 affective empathy six items , cognitive empathy three items , and intention to comfort five items.
The fourth factor consisted of three theoretically unrelated items i. Subsequently, another PCA was performed with the 14 final items. The overall KMO measure 0. Parallel analysis indicated a 3-factor solution. The three factors combined explained Following rotation, all items loaded on the intended factor; the following analyses were thus performed with the newly formed three scales. See Table 4 for a complete list of all items and factor loadings. TABLE 4. Standardized factor loadings ranged from 0.
Thus, the three-factor model based on the final set of 14 items was retained see Table 4. The mean scores in Table 3 show that girls scored higher on affective empathy, cognitive empathy , and intention to comfort.
Correlations between all three scales were significant, but still below 0. The correlations remained significant when analyzed separately per age group see Table 1 for more information about the age groups. Table 3 also presents the means of all included constructs separately for boys and girls. Boys and girls differed significantly on all measures, except for differentiating emotions.
TABLE 5. The results showed a negative correlation between affective empathy and differentiating emotions , and a negative correlation between affective empathy and bodily awareness of emotions and intention to comfort and bodily awareness of emotions.
When we examined the relationships of the EmQue-CA scales with indices of social functioning, we found that friendship quality correlated positively with affective empathy , and intention to comfort. Bullying , on the other hand, correlated negatively with all three scales of the EmQue-CA. All correlations remained significant after controlling for age. To test for gender differences regarding the strengths of the relationships i.
We tested for gender differences in the correlations of the EmQue-CA scales and age by applying Fisher r-to-Z transformation to calculate a value of z. In this study, we examined the construct, convergent, and concurrent validity of the EmQue-CA, a newly developed empathy questionnaire for children and adolescents. The outcomes of this study confirm a three-factor structure within the EmQue-CA. Moreover, the three identified scales show good internal consistencies, as well as the expected relationships with another validated empathy measure i.
The negative correlations of the affective empathy scale and the intention to comfort scale of the EmQue-CA with the scale bodily awareness of emotions of the EAQ were as expected. This is in line with prior findings showing that being aware of your own emotions and the emotions of others is related to reporting less depressive symptoms Rieffe and De Rooij, Yet, follow up comparisons showed that this negative relationship between affective empathy and differentiating emotions was only significant in boys, suggesting that internal feelings of girls did not seem to influence their ability to show concern for others.
A suggestion that could be explained by the gender identification hypothesis stating that girls are socialized into specific gender roles e. This could be explained by gender differences in affective empathy as proved by several experiments using different neurophysiological measures see Christove-Moore et al.
Since this difference was specifically found in affective empathy, this could also explain why in our study differentiating emotions did not relate to cognitive empathy and intention to comfort.
In future studies, the exact mechanism should be examined more extensively. In other words, in order to feel, understand and act in a prosocial way, one needs to be able to attend to the emotions of others.
This should be examined in more detail in future studies; more insight in this gender difference can be highly informative for understanding the development of empathy and prosocial behavior. To further unravel the specific role of empathy and intention to comfort in social interactions during childhood and adolescence, we examined how the scales related to both positive and negative aspects of social relationships. The positive link between friendship quality and all three scales is in line with our expectations and confirms the importance of empathy for social interactions irrespective of gender Soenens et al.
Due to inconsistent findings on the link between empathy and bullying behavior in prior studies, we did not have a priori expectations.
Our results show that high levels of affective empathy, cognitive empathy and intention to comfort were associated with lower levels of bullying behavior. Importantly, bullying behavior was related to all three scales, supporting the protective role of empathy in offensive behaviors. Examining age-related changes in empathy, our results showed an increase in affective empathy and cognitive empathy in girls, and a decrease in affective empathy, cognitive empathy, and intention to comfort in boys across childhood and early adolescence.
The fact that we found contradictory findings for males and females regarding the relationship between empathy and age could be explained by the gender identification hypothesis Hill and Lynch, An increase in affective and cognitive empathy with age in girls is in line with gender specific socialization processes where the social environment expects girls to attach importance to interpersonal relations.
These interpersonal relationships become more and more important during adolescence, which could be related to higher self-reported empathy. Boys on the other hand are stimulated to focus on high achievements, whereby a competitive attitude is highly valued Hill and Lynch, Since adolescence is important for developing independency and individuality, this gender role could result in decreased self-reported empathy in boys.
Moreover, a prior study by Hermans et al. Considering the fact that boys tend to have increased testosterone levels, specifically during adolescence, this could be a possible explanation for the negative relationship between all 3 empathy scales.
Apart from the age-related effects, the finding that self-reports of affective empathy, cognitive empathy, and intention to comfort were higher in girls than in boys was in accordance with previous findings, which indicate that girls more often tend to get affected by and share emotions with friends and other important people Taylor et al. However, the age-related increase in affective empathy deviates from the study performed by Van der Graaff et al.
Allemand et al. Their results showed that girls scored generally higher than boys. However, they also found individual differences in the developmental trajectory of empathy in both boys and girls. Some participants showed a decrease in empathy — predictive for worse social skills later in life —, whereas others showed an increase in empathy that was indicative for higher social skills in adulthood. Overall, this emphasizes the importance of investigating the role of individual differences beyond gender differences.
Moreover, we also found a developmental decrease in intention to comfort in boys. Similar effects were reported by Meuwese et al. This decrease could be linked to a decrease in prosocial behavior, especially when being fair i.
However, it should be noted that the differences in mean levels of intention to comfort in the different age groups are small and have to be interpreted with caution. Therefore, longitudinal studies are necessary to confirm these age trends.
During these nurturing interactions, infants fall deeply in love with the people who care for them. These strongly felt connections give them the emotional capacity for later feelings of empathy. Empathy, an important component of social and emotional development, emerges within consistent and caring relationships over several years. Much of the groundwork is laid during early attachments formed in infancy:. Nine-month-old Jamal loves to put the blanket on his head, pull it off, and look for cheers of approval.
He is learning to read facial and gestural cues, repeating activities that make people laugh. He is becoming more aware of other people and how they are feeling — an essential precursor to empathy. While many junior toddlers are sensitive to the feelings of others, they don't yet feel empathy. Ben, for example, begins to cry when his mother is temporarily out of sight.
Emily, another one-year-old playing next to him, suddenly turns somber. Ben's anxiety has triggered a similar feeling in Emily. Although she has been affected by Ben's tears, she is not yet aware of why her playmate is crying and has no need to comfort him.
Toddlers observe and imitate the adults who care for them. When month-old Anna falls and scrapes her knee, a group of children gather around her and watch as her teacher comforts her. In time, they will use the teacher's behavior as their template for comforting others. Empathic behavior needs to be repeatedly modeled by adults and encouraged in children before it becomes part of their behavior.
Developing empathy is a gradual process. At first a toddler may only have a vague impression that something is wrong. Twenty-month-old Jenny, for example, is busy helping to find baby Sally's favorite blanket. Jenny's teacher explicitly encourages her: "Thank you for helping to make Sally feel better! Two-year-old Jeremy pats his friend's back when he starts to cry after dropping his ice cream cone. Jeremy has internalized all the comforting pats that he has received whenever he was upset.
His empathy is limited, however, to familiar situations that he has experienced himself, like losing a favorite toy or having to say good-bye to Mommy in the morning. It's hard work for a two-year-old to understand the perspective of others.
Try telling a toddler that you're too tired to play when she's eager to go outside for a game of Chase Me! Her strong need to run will easily outweigh any empathic feelings she might have for her tired teacher. Yet when Emily's noodles keep slipping off her spoon, a fellow two-year-old gets up and begins to feed her with his spoon!
Toddlers can care for one another-specially when helping each other is talked about and modeled by the adults who care for them. Brittany smiles as she strokes the fur of a special fluffy classroom visitor. Three-year-old Valerie says to her teacher: "Look at Brittany. She's happy petting the kitty. Pet me.
I'll be your kitty now. Valerie and Marc are exhibiting various emotional and cognitive aspects of the important pro-social behavior empathy. Valerie's comments show that a three-year-old can comprehend a connection between emotions and desires. When Brittany has something she wants, such as the kitty, she's happy; but when she loses it, she's sad.
Valerie recognizes Brittany's distress and responds to it with a simple, soothing gesture. Quite verbal at age four, Marc's response relates to the cognitive aspect of empathy At this age, he is beginning to see situations from another person's perspective more easily.
Relating to Brittany's feelings, he acknowledges her unhappiness, empathizes, and then offers a strategy to make her feel better. Social psychologists believe that although children are born with a capacity for empathy, they can also learn to become empathic. However, empathy has to be natural, spontaneous, and sincere. Jarrod's teacher tells him: "Daniel is crying. Paint is splashed all over his picture.
You must tell him that you're sorry. In fact, the insincerity of this process may teach him that others' feelings don't really matter. Instead, the teacher needs to encourage Jarrod's participation in the process by asking: "How do you think Daniel is feeling?
What might you do to help him? Some three-year-olds may not be able to respond to another child's feelings if they don't share the same feelings and perspective on a situation. While building a castle in the big outdoor sandbox, Ingrid yells loudly, "Hey!
Stop stomping on my castle!
0コメント