Children's Empathic Responses to Emotional Complexity

Abstract

The aim of this study was to assess the empathic reactivity of children when confronted with two different emotions felt by the same character. A total of 90 girls, divided into three equal groups aged 4, 6, and 8 years, were asked to verbally respond to a series of fictitious stories illustrated by a picture where the character's face was left blank. Four of these episodes implied one simple emotion, and the remaining four were complex episodes where the situation potentially induced two opposite emotions within the character, either successively or simultaneously. Empathy was scored according to (a) the match between the emotion identified in the character and the one reported by the subject, and (b) the interpretation given for the subject's reaction. Both the quality of the match and the level of interpretation from self-to event-to character-centred justifications-were found to increase with age, for complex as well as for simple emotions. However, children of all three age-groups displayed less empathic capabilities when witnessing complex rather than simple episodes, given the more demanding task involved in recognising and sharing emotional complexity. Finally, successive emotions appeared more difficult to cope with than simultaneous emotions, but this decalage may be due to the content of the stimuli used in this study.