Children between 9 and 18 months old already demonstrate empathy, suggesting this ability starts at an earlier age than previously thought, even for babies from different cultural backgrounds.
鈥淚f I don鈥檛 understand your emotions, I can鈥檛 communicate with you and I can鈥檛 respond to your emotions, so it鈥檚 an essential skill 鈥� but we only know how it develops in a small part of the world,鈥� says at the Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education in Germany.
His team tested empathy in 44 children from rural villages in Uganda and 49 from urban, suburban and rural areas of York in the UK. An adult 鈥� either a local researcher or the infant鈥檚 mother 鈥� simulated pain or discomfort, saying 鈥渙ooh鈥� and 鈥渙uch鈥� as if hurt while rubbing their finger. Then researchers observed the children鈥檚 facial expressions and whether they engaged in any comforting behaviors, such as stroking or hugging.
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Vreden expected to see all the children鈥檚 faces reacting, because it is known that babies are already sensitive to emotions at 9 months old. But he says it was unexpected and remarkable that about 9 per cent of the 9-month-old UK infants and about 15 per cent of the Ugandan ones stroked or hugged their mothers to comfort their pain.
These results suggest empathy begins earlier than previously thought. Prior research clear signs of empathy, like getting upset when you see someone else in distress, don鈥檛 appear until about 12 months old. These behaviours occur more consistently with age and by 19 months, children respond to others鈥� distress by soothing them.
Vreden and his colleagues also found an increase in empathy as the children got older. Compared with the 9-month-olds, more than twice as many 18-month-olds comforted their mothers. 鈥淵ou could say that the building blocks for empathy are in place at a very young age, but that it takes them a while to come together, and that some related skills are required to develop first too,鈥� says Vreden.
Empathy is such an ancient evolutionary mechanism, he says, that it didn鈥檛 surprise him that it was found in both UK and Ugandan children at the same ages, despite differences in upbringing. Other shows that in Uganda, parents value obedience and respect for others more, while in the UK, they value autonomy and emotional expressiveness more.
鈥淲e鈥檙e seeing in both contexts that the kids are responsive to that distress, that they act on behalf of the individual, and I think it鈥檚 a really smart and sort of special contribution in the more recent literature,鈥� says at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, who wasn鈥檛 involved in the study.
The majority of research on empathy development focuses on children from Europe and North America, and very little is known about children in the rest of the world. 鈥淚f we are only looking at a very small percentage of the world that isn鈥檛 actually representative, then we are not capturing human cognition and behavior at all,鈥� says Vreden.
The data does suggest subtle differences between the two groups Vreden studied. The British babies, for instance, were more likely to comfort spontaneously before the adult verbally expressed pain, while the Ugandan babies tended to comfort after the audible cue.
Such findings are going to 鈥渂e important in the long term鈥�, says Dunfield, by showing just how empathy, this human tendency to care for one another, develops.
PLOS One
