The relations of ego-resiliency and emotion socialization to the development of empathy and prosocial behavior across early childhood.

Empathy is an affective response that results from comprehension or apprehension of another’s emotional state or condition (Eisenberg, Fabes, & Spinrad, 2006); thus, it involves both a rudimentary (or higher) understanding of another’s emotion and vicarious sharing of it. Empathy emerges in basic form early in life (i.e., newborns’ reactive crying to another’s distress) and becomes more sophisticated in toddlerhood (Roth-Hanania, Davidov, & Zahn-Waxler, 2011; Vaish, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009; Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, Wagner, & Chapman, 1992), a period in which children increasingly become aware of others’ feelings and differing perspectives (Hoffman, 2000, 2007). The development of empathy has been linked to children’s growing social and cognitive skills such as emotion understanding, perspective taking, and self-awareness that provide them with an awareness of other people’s feelings and needs (Eisenberg et al., 2006; Hoffman, 2007). Researchers have focused mostly on cognitive skills as antecedents to empathic abilities in early childhood, whereas there is relatively little work on dispositional characteristics of toddlers and young preschoolers that predict empathic responding. In particular, how well children manage and recoup from stress—their ego-resiliency—could affect their responses to others’ emotional distress. However, relations between the trait of ego-resiliency and children’s dispositional empathy remain understudied, especially during early childhood. Also important, much of the work on parental socialization of empathy has pertained to parental disciplinary practices, whereas parental socialization of emotion has received limited attention (for a review, see Eisenberg et al., 2006; Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Taylor, in press). Moreover, there are relatively few longitudinal studies of empathy so it is difficult to draw conclusions about the role of early socialization or dispositional characteristics in the development of empathy. Empathy is of interest to developmentalists because it sometimes appears to foster prosocial actions as well as concern for the well-being of others (i.e., sympathy; Eisenberg et al., 2006, in press), although empathic overarousal can result in an aversive, self-focused reaction labeled personal distress (see Batson, 1991; Eisenberg et al., 2006; Trommsdorff, Friedlmeier, & Mayer, 2007). There is a natural conceptual link between empathy and prosocial behavior—intentional behavior intended to benefit another (Eisenberg et al., 2006)—because the process of empathizing with others is expected to increase the likelihood of understanding another person’s feelings and responding in a sensitive manner. However, researchers have seldom examined the growth of empathy in relation to children’s later prosocial behavior. Furthermore, few researchers have examined mediation in regard to children’s empathy, and those that do typically assess mediators of empathy, not empathy as a mediator (for exceptions, see Krevans & Gibbs, 1996, and Padilla-Walker & Christensen, 2011, who found that empathy mediated the relations between parenting and prosocial behavior during early adolescence). Empathy has been found to mediate the relations between peer attachment and prosocial behavior in college students (Carlo, McGinley, Hayes, & Martinez, 2012) and the relation between social exclusion and prosocial behavior in adults (Twenge, Baumeister, DeWall, Ciarocco, & Bartels, 2007). Given these gaps in the literature, the present study had the following aims. First, we examined whether dispositional ego-resiliency and maternal socialization of emotions were early predictors of the development in children’s empathy across early childhood. Our second aim was to examine if empathy, including its initial level and change over time, mediated the relation between children’s dispositional ego-resiliency, as well as maternal emotion socialization behaviors, and children’s later prosocial behavior. Our final aim was to identify whether the growth of empathy predicted children’s prosocial behavior with their peers in later childhood.