At what age do children learn to empathize with others? And how can empathy be promoted? Researchers who have examined the development of compassion in children between the ages of six and 18 months are now providing evidence of this. This means that although infants can already be infected by the feelings of others, it is only in the course of their second year of life that they are able to differentiate between themselves and others and to feel real compassion. Social learning apparently plays an important role: the more sensitively the child’s caregiver responded to his needs, the more compassion he showed for others at 18 months.
Compassion is one of the fundamental abilities that make our human coexistence possible. However, the age at which it occurs in small children has so far been controversial. Basically, it had already been shown that even infants react to the feelings of others: If another child cries, they often burst into tears too. Even if this is a first step on the way to empathy, researchers do not yet consider such behavior to be genuine compassion. “Compassion is about being able to regulate the emotion and not be overwhelmed by it,” explains Markus Paulus from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich.
Compassion in the test
Together with his team, the developmental psychologist experimentally determined the age at which children are actually able to empathize with others without simply transferring other people’s feelings onto themselves. To do this, they examined 127 small children and their mothers in playful situations in the laboratory at various times. At the first appointment the children were six months old. Further examinations took place at the ages of 10, 14 and 18 months.
To test the children’s compassion, the researchers had them watch as an experimenter hit her foot and then began to cry. In another experiment, the child’s mother simulated having injured her finger with a toy and also crying. After a minute, the experimenter or mother calmed down again and reassured the child that they were feeling much better now. As a control condition, the children were also allowed to watch the experimenter reading a funny book and laughing loudly.
Development in the second year of life
The result: While the little test subjects at the ages of six and ten months were partially infected by crying but did not show any empathic reactions towards others, at the ages of 14 and 18 months they increasingly showed compassion. They grimaced in pity or tried to comfort the crying person with words, caresses, or hugs.
Using further playful tests, the researchers examined possible factors influencing the development of compassion. Among other things, they checked whether the children recognized themselves in the mirror – an important step towards self-knowledge. Because: “In order to experience compassion, the child must be able to distinguish between the self and the other person,” says Paulus.
Social role models
The team also let mother and child play freely for eight minutes and observed how sensitively the mother reacted to her child. Together with the results of the empathy tests, it was shown that children with particularly sensitive mothers showed greater compassion than their peers whose mothers were less responsive to them. Accordingly, small children learn compassion from their caregivers. “A child could not survive without sensitive caregivers who act with compassion,” says Paulus. “The children learn from them how to deal with negative emotions. This means they are able to apply it themselves later.”
Source: Markus Paulus (LMU Munich) et al., Cognitive Development, doi: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2024.101439