Abstract
A longitudinal study of 45 mothers and their first-born infants was conducted to identify developmentally meaningful, individual differences in children's primitive empathic responding at 12 months of age, and to determine whether differences in self-regulatory skills assessed at 4 months might underlie any differences in empathic responding observed. Personal distress responses analogous to those observed in older children and adults were identified in one-third of the sample at 12 months of age. These distress responses were associated with indices of poorer self-regulatory skills in social contexts at 4 months of age. The results are interpreted within the broader framework of the development of self-regulatory strategies in the early childhood years.
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This research was supported by grants from the Australian Research Council, the National Research Fellowship Scheme, and the Macquarie University Research Grant Scheme. We thank Judy Chan, Alison Malbourne, Sylvana Sturevska, and Lorraine Smith for their assistance in data collection and analysis.
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Ungerer, J.A., Dolby, R., Waters, B. et al. The early development of empathy: Self-regulation and individual differences in the first year. Motiv Emot 14, 93–106 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00991638
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00991638