Thiede Noemi, Stengelin Roman, Seibold Astrid, Haun Daniel B M
Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
Department of Psychology and Social Work, University of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia.
Open Mind (Camb). 2023 Sep 20;7:691-710. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00102. eCollection 2023.
Empathy is commonly considered a driver of prosociality in child ontogeny, but causal assumptions regarding this effect mostly rely on correlational research designs. Here, 96 urban German children (5-8 years; 48 girls; predominantly White; from mid-to-high socioeconomic backgrounds) participated in an empathy intervention or a control condition before prosocial behaviors (polite lie-telling: rating the drawing as ; prosocial encouragement: utterances interpreted as cheering up the artist) were assessed in an art-rating task. Contrasting children's empathy at baseline with their empathy after the intervention indicated promoted empathy compared to the control group. Despite the intervention's effect on children's empathy, there were no simultaneous changes in prosocial behaviors. At the same time, children's empathy at baseline was associated with their prosocial encouragement. These results indicate conceptual associations between children's empathy and prosociality. However, they do not support strict causal claims regarding this association in middle childhood. Further applications of the novel short-time intervention to address causal effects of empathy on prosociality and other developmental outcomes are discussed.
共情通常被认为是儿童个体发育过程中亲社会行为的驱动因素，但关于这种影响的因果假设大多依赖于相关研究设计。在此，96名德国城市儿童（5至8岁；48名女孩；主要为白人；来自中高社会经济背景）在亲社会行为（礼貌说谎：将画作评为……；亲社会鼓励：被解释为鼓励艺术家的言语）在一项艺术评分任务中得到评估之前，参与了共情干预或对照条件。将儿童基线时的共情与干预后的共情进行对比，结果表明与对照组相比，共情得到了提升。尽管干预对儿童的共情产生了影响，但亲社会行为并没有同时发生变化。与此同时，儿童基线时的共情与他们的亲社会鼓励相关。这些结果表明了儿童共情与亲社会行为之间的概念关联。然而，它们并不支持关于童年中期这种关联的严格因果主张。本文还讨论了这种新型短期干预在解决共情对亲社会行为及其他发展结果的因果效应方面的进一步应用。
