The Emergence of Empathy during Infancy

ABSTRACT Empathy refers to the interpersonal sharing of emotional states brought about by knowledge or observation by one person of the other person's experience or emotional state. This review presents several models of empathy and summarizes empirical research regarding the emergence and development of componential skills. The earliest emerging skills discussed are imitation, emotion matching, and emotional contagion. We provide support for the claim that these capacities, evident from the first hours of life, strengthen the relational bonds between infants and caregivers. In the context of early attachment relationships, infants learn emotion regulation and responsiveness to affective signals. At approximately ten months, infants begin to regulate their behavior on the basis of affective messages from adults. The emergence of empathy has been studied by observing infants' responses to other people's distress. Responses to distress undergo changes during the second year such that self-distress responses decrease and prosocial responses increase. These changes co-occur with the achievement of several important milestones in cognitive development such as self-recognition, agency, and awareness of other perspectives. The behavioral markers of developing empathic abilities during this period are presented in conjunction with findings regarding the neurobiology of empathy in childhood. Suggestions are made for approaches to fill gaps in our understanding of the emergence of empathy during infancy. KEYWORDS: development, empathy, emotion, affective sharing, emotional responsiveness. Determining the age at which infants display empathy depends in large part upon the way the construct is defined. Most models of empathy involve "an affective response that is more appropriate to another's situation that one's own" (Hoffman, 2000, p. 4). Hoffman's model (1982, 1983) additionally emphasizes a motivational component of empathy and its role as a catalyst of altruistic behavior. Preston and de Waal (2002) propose a "process model of empathy", based upon mechanisms that support a class of responses that includes emotional contagion, sympathy, cognitive empathy, and prosocial or helping behavior. According to their model, "attended perception of the object's state automatically activates the subject's representations of the state, situation, and object, and that activation of these representations automatically primes or generates the associated autonomic and somatic responses, unless inhibited" (p. 4). In contrast, other models of empathy propose a more developmentally advanced construct that requires self-other differentiation and subjective understanding of the other person's state. For instance, Eisenberg and colleagues (1998) propose that empathy is "an affective reaction that results from the apprehension or comprehension of another's emotional state or condition, and that is identical or very similar to what the other person is feeling or would be expected to feel" (p. 702). Decety and Jackson (2004) propose a more explicitly cognitive model featuring three functional components that interact to produce an empathic response. These components include affective sharing that entails common representation of an experience, self-other awareness in order to differentiate the observer from the object, and "mental flexibility to adopt the subjective perspective of the other and also regulatory processes" (p. 75). Feshbach's model (1975, 1978) incorporates discrimination among affective states, perspective taking, and the modulation of an appropriate emotional response. This review of the literature regarding the emergence of affective responsiveness during infancy does not seek to arbitrate among models, but to summarize and synthesize empirical findings about the development of capacities that contribute to a range of empathic responses. This report begins with a survey of the literature regarding qualities of infants' contributions and responses to their earliest social interactions. …