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.
“If I don’t understand your emotions, I can’t communicate with you and I can’t respond to your emotions, so it’s an essential skill – but we only know how it develops in a small part of the world,” 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 – either a local researcher or the infant’s mother – simulated pain or discomfort, saying “oooh” and “ouch” as if hurt while rubbing their finger. Then researchers observed the children’s 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’s 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’t appear until about 12 months old. These behaviours occur more consistently with age and by 19 months, children respond to others’ 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. “You 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,” says Vreden.
Empathy is such an ancient evolutionary mechanism, he says, that it didn’t 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.
“We’re seeing in both contexts that the kids are responsive to that distress, that they act on behalf of the individual, and I think it’s a really smart and sort of special contribution in the more recent literature,” says at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, who wasn’t 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. “If we are only looking at a very small percentage of the world that isn’t actually representative, then we are not capturing human cognition and behavior at all,” 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 “be important in the long term”, says Dunfield, by showing just how empathy, this human tendency to care for one another, develops.
PLOS One
