Department of Clinical Neurodevelopmental Sciences, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Dev Psychobiol. 2020 May;62(4):454-470. doi: 10.1002/dev.21903. Epub 2019 Sep 6.
Although emotional responses are theorized to be important in the development of empathy, findings regarding the prediction of early empathic behavior by infant behavioral and physiological responses are mixed. This study examined whether behavioral and physiological responses to mild emotional challenge (still face paradigm and car seat task) in 118 infants at age 6 months predicted empathic distress and empathic concern in response to an empathy-evoking task (i.e, experimenter's distress simulation) at age 20 months. Correlation analyses, corrected for sex and baseline levels of physiological arousal, showed that stronger physiological and behavioral responses to emotional challenge at age 6 months were positively related to observed empathic distress, but not empathic concern, at age 20 months. Linear regression analyses indicated that physiological and behavioral responses to challenge at 6 months independently predicted empathic distress at 20 months, which suggests an important role for both physiological and behavioral emotional responses in empathy development. In addition, curvilinear regression analyses showed quadratic associations between behavioral responses at 6 months, and empathic distress and empathic concern at 20 months, which indicates that moderate levels of behavioral responsivity predict the highest levels of empathic distress and empathic concern.
虽然情绪反应被认为在同理心的发展中很重要，但关于婴儿行为和生理反应对早期同理心行为的预测的发现却存在分歧。本研究考察了 118 名 6 个月大的婴儿在轻度情绪挑战（静止面孔范式和汽车座椅任务）下的行为和生理反应是否能预测 20 个月大时对同理心诱发任务（即实验者的痛苦模拟）的同理心痛苦和同理心关注。相关性分析，校正了性别和生理唤醒的基线水平，表明 6 个月大时对情绪挑战的更强的生理和行为反应与 20 个月大时观察到的同理心痛苦有关，但与同理心关注无关。线性回归分析表明，6 个月时的挑战的生理和行为反应独立地预测了 20 个月时的同理心痛苦，这表明生理和行为情绪反应在同理心发展中都起着重要作用。此外，二次回归分析显示，6 个月时的行为反应与 20 个月时的同理心痛苦和同理心关注之间存在二次关联，这表明中等水平的行为反应能力预测了同理心痛苦和同理心关注的最高水平。
