Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
Infancy. 2020 Nov;25(6):888-909. doi: 10.1111/infa.12366. Epub 2020 Sep 19.
Empathy, crucial to harmonious interpersonal relationships and moral development, has both affective and cognitive components. Previous studies found that toddlers' temperamental inhibition may influence their empathy, but mainly focused on emotional response to others' distress. Little is known about whether inhibited children's poor empathy is due to high reactivity and social withdrawal when sharing others' affective states, such as distress (affective empathy), or to a difficulty in comprehending and inferring others' perspective (cognitive empathy). The current study investigated the role of behavioral inhibition (BI) in affective empathy (response to pain simulation) and cognitive empathy (performance in perspective-taking task) among 163 Chinese toddlers and tested in both only and non-only children. Correlation analyses showed that BI was only negatively associated with affective empathy. The relation between BI and cognitive empathy was moderated by self-regulation and inhibited children who were low in self-regulation presented low cognitive empathy. Additionally, only children presented advanced cognitive empathy but poorer affective empathy than non-only children. These findings imply different roles of BI in affective versus cognitive empathy in early childhood. Although highly inhibited children rarely show positive social expression toward others' distress, caution is needed in inferring that they lack a capacity for cognitive empathy.
同理心对于和谐的人际关系和道德发展至关重要，它具有情感和认知两个组成部分。先前的研究发现，幼儿的气质抑制可能会影响他们的同理心，但主要集中在对他人痛苦的情绪反应上。对于抑制儿童同理心较差是由于在分享他人的情感状态（如痛苦）时反应过度和社交退缩（情感同理心），还是由于难以理解和推断他人的观点（认知同理心），人们知之甚少。本研究调查了行为抑制（BI）在 163 名中国幼儿的情感同理心（对疼痛模拟的反应）和认知同理心（在换位思考任务中的表现）中的作用，并在只有和非只有儿童中进行了测试。相关分析表明，BI 仅与情感同理心呈负相关。BI 和认知同理心之间的关系受到自我调节的调节，自我调节能力低的抑制儿童表现出较低的认知同理心。此外，独生子女性表现出较高的认知同理心，但对他人痛苦的情感同理心较差，而非独生子女性。这些发现表明，BI 在幼儿期的情感同理心和认知同理心方面具有不同的作用。尽管高度抑制的儿童很少对他人的痛苦表现出积极的社交表达，但在推断他们缺乏认知同理心的能力时需要谨慎。
