Department of Psychology, University of OtagoDunedin, New Zealand.
School of Psychology, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia.
PLoS One. 2019 Jan 18;14(1):e0209253. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0209253. eCollection 2019.
Previous research has examined empathic concern by presenting toddlers with a sad stimulus and examining their emotional response, with the conclusion that toddlers display empathy. Yet, such research has failed to include basic control conditions involving some other aversive stimulus such as white noise. Nor has it compared toddlers to adults to examine potential development in empathy. In the present study, we showed toddlers and adults four video types: infant crying, infant laughing, infant babbling, and a neutral infant accompanied by white noise. We then coded happiness and sadness while viewing the videos, and created a difference score (happiness minus sadness), testing 52 toddlers and 61 adults. Whereas adults showed more sadness towards infant crying than any other stimulus, toddlers' response to crying and white noise was similar. Thus, the toddler response to crying was comparable to previous studies (slight sadness), but was no different to white noise and was significantly reduced relative to adults. As such, toddlers' response seemed to be better characterized as a reaction to an aversive stimulus rather than empathy.
先前的研究通过向幼儿呈现悲伤的刺激物并观察他们的情绪反应来考察同理心，得出的结论是幼儿具有同理心。然而，此类研究未能包括涉及其他厌恶刺激（如白噪声）的基本对照条件。也没有将幼儿与成年人进行比较，以考察同理心的潜在发展。在本研究中，我们向幼儿和成年人展示了四种视频类型：婴儿哭泣、婴儿大笑、婴儿咿呀学语和伴随白噪声的中性婴儿。然后，我们在观看视频时对快乐和悲伤进行编码，并创建了一个差值分数（快乐减去悲伤），对 52 名幼儿和 61 名成年人进行了测试。虽然成年人对婴儿哭泣的反应比任何其他刺激都更悲伤，但幼儿对哭泣和白噪声的反应相似。因此，幼儿对哭泣的反应与之前的研究相似（轻微悲伤），但与白噪声没有区别，与成年人相比明显减少。因此，幼儿的反应似乎更适合被描述为对厌恶刺激的反应，而不是同理心。
