Research Findings: Empathy plays an important role in children's early social-emotional development. However, there are not many instruments available for measuring the different aspects/levels of empathy in preschool children. Moreover, few studies examined the validity of the existing measures for empathy in Chinese children. The present study…

Relations among White (non-Latinx) children's empathy-related responding, prosocial behaviors, and racial attitudes toward White and Black peers were examined. In 2017, 190 (54% boys) White 5- to 9-year-old children (M = 7.09 years, SD = 0.94) watched a series of videos that depicted social rejection of either a White or Black child.…

Some work demonstrates toddlers show preferences in targets of their prosocial behavior, and a number of theorists have argued that young children become increasingly likely to direct their prosocial behavior to ingroup over outgroup targets with development. The goal of this study was to examine whether toddlers' early helping, sharing, and…

Many prosocial behaviors involve social risks such as speaking out against a popular opinion, bias, group norm, or authority. However, little is known about whether adolescents' prosocial tendencies develop over time with their perceptions of social risks. This accelerated longitudinal study used within-subject growth-curve analyses to test the…

A quasi-experimental study was conducted in the eighth grade of two public schools located in Central Delhi. Two classes (95 participants) in the intervention school and three classes (108 participants) in the comparison school participated. The brief intervention was implemented across four 2-hour sessions for 1 month in the intervention school.…

Reactivity to others' emotions not only can result in empathic concern (EC), an important motivator of prosocial behavior, but can also result in personal distress (PD), which may hinder prosocial behavior. Examining neural substrates of emotional reactivity may elucidate how EC and PD differentially influence prosocial behavior. Participants…

Vagal tone is widely believed to be an important physiological aspect of emotion regulation and associated positive behaviors. However, there is inconsistent evidence for relations between children's baseline vagal tone and their helpful or prosocial responses to others (Hastings & Miller, 2014). Recent work in adults suggests a quadratic…

In this study, we sought to create and validate a brief measure to assess students' perceptions of kindness in school. Participants included 1,753 students in Grades 4 to 8 attending public schools in a large school district in southern British Columbia. The School Kindness Scale (SKS) demonstrated a unidimensional factor structure and adequate…

Age-related and individual differences in adolescents' and emerging adults' stories of real-life empathic and nonempathic experiences were examined. A total of 29 adolescents (M = 15.28, SD = 0.99) and 31 emerging adults (M = 18.23, SD = 0.56) told stories of empathic and nonempathic life events and completed measures of authoritative parenting…

Empathy and sympathy play crucial roles in much of human social interaction and are necessary components for healthy coexistence. Sympathy is thought to be a proxy for motivating prosocial behavior and providing the affective and motivational base for moral development. The purpose of the present study was to use functional MRI to characterize…

The authors investigated whether students' positive perceptions of their high school's culture were associated with higher levels of empathy and prosocial behavior. The authors collected information from 2 samples to ensure a wide range of school culture perceptions. As expected, empathy and prosocial behavior were correlated. As evidence of the…

Observational measures of monozygotic and dizygotic twins' reactions to simulations of distress in others were obtained when the twins were 14 and 20 months old. Components of concern for others increased with age. Girls scored higher than boys on most measures. There was modest evidence for heritability of empathy. (BC)

Examines the effects of age, sex, and communicative situation on several comforting communication skills of first- through twelfth-grade subjects. Results indicated that the number, variety, and sensitivity of comfort-intended message strategies increased significantly with age and that strategies were used differently by males and females.…

Children were given an opportunity to share a valuable commodity with an attractive or unattractive peer. Moments later, the peer appeared to fall from a chair. Results indicated older children shared more of their resources; sharing and responses to the emergency were positively correlated with empathic test scores. (Author/RC)

Examines the role of others' emotions and children's responsive empathy with those emotions in the context of children's motivation to help others. (PCB)