Convergence and divergence of empathic concern and empathic happiness in early childhood: Evidence from young infants and children

Abstract While most research focused on empathic responses to negative emotions, little is known about empathy to positive emotions. We aimed to bridge this gap by examining infants' and children's empathic responses to distress and happiness, while differentiating between cognitive and emotional empathy. We conducted three studies with N = 119 3‐month‐old infants; N = 169 10‐19 months‐old infants; and N = 61 24‐60 months‐old children (all Jewish‐Israeli). Empathy was measured using experimenter simulations (studies 1 and 3) or peer‐video (study 2). All studies showed that cognitive empathy to positive and negative emotions converged (small‐medium effect size), but not so for emotional empathy. This suggests that understanding others' emotions is independent of emotion valence, while the ability to share in another's emotion is valence‐specific.

• Publication year

  2024

• Venue

  Child Development

• Publication date

  2024-09-29

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/cdev.14176PMID 39342634PMCID 11693825
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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