Development of empathy
•Empathy involves feeling and understanding
another’s emotional state, which goes beyond mere sympathy.
•Martin Hoffman’s research has yielded the
following:
–emotional contagion of
newborns (global
empathy)
–during the second year,
babies actively attempt to comfort a person in distress, particularly
their moms
•has been shown in reactions to staged
events such as
mother’s pretending to hurt an ankle.
–preschoolers empathize
with a wider set of feelings and can empathize with people they have not met
including story characters they can only imagine and people they learn about
through the media.
–between 6 and 9 years of
age, children begin to empathize with people based on their knowledge
of troublesome social-environmental conditions such as being sick, living in
poverty, or losing a relative.
Sources:
Hoffman, Martin (2000). Empathy
and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice.
Cambridge University Press; Hoffman, Martin (1977).
Moral internalization: current theory and research. In L. Berkowitz, (Ed.), Advances
in Experimental Psychology, Vol. 10, New
York: Academic Press; Hoffman, Martin (1982). Development of prosocial
motivation: empathy and guilt. In N.
Eisenberg (Ed.) The Development of Prosocial Behavior. New York: Academic Press. Slide arranged by
Gordon Vessels, 2005.