Indicators of affective empathy, cognitive empathy, and social attention during emotional clips in relation to aggression in 3-year-olds

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2019.04.012Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Affective empathy was negatively associated with aggression at age three.

  • Social attention was also negatively associated with aggression.

  • Increased social attention reduced the effect of affective empathy on aggression.

  • Cognitive empathy was not associated with aggression.

Abstract

Research indicates that impaired empathy is a risk factor of aggression and that social attention is important for empathy. The role of social attention in associations between empathy and aggression has not yet been fully elucidated. Therefore, indicators of affective empathy, cognitive empathy, social attention, and aggression were simultaneously assessed in children aged 45 months. A total of 61 mother–child dyads participated in a lab visit, during which maternal reports of aggression were obtained. Children watched three clips showing a sad, scared, and happy child, respectively, and a neutral social clip while heart rate was recorded. Heart rate change from nonsocial baseline clips to emotional clips was calculated as an index of affective empathy. Questions about the emotions of the children in the clips were asked to assess cognitive empathy. Social attention was defined as time spent looking at faces during the clips. Correlation analyses revealed negative associations between affective empathy and aggression and between social attention and aggression. Furthermore, multivariate linear regression analyses indicated that the association between affective empathy and aggression was moderated by social attention; the negative association between affective empathy and aggression was stronger in children with relatively reduced social attention. No association was found between cognitive empathy and aggression. Therefore, both affective empathy and social attention are important targets for early interventions that aim to prevent or reduce aggression.

Introduction

Empathy, the sharing and understanding of feelings of others, is a fundamental aspect of social competence, and a lack of empathy has been associated with aggressive behavior (Jolliffe and Farrington, 2004, Miller and Eisenberg, 1988, Vachon et al., 2013, van Langen et al., 2014). The observation of distress in others may prompt the withdrawal of aggression by increasing autonomic arousal (e.g., increase in heart rate), which is experienced as aversive (Blair, 1995, Blair, 2006). Learning the causal link between aggressive behavior and the subsequent experience of aversive arousal due to the distress of the other person motivates children to refrain from actions that harm others. In children, adolescents, and adults, negative associations between empathy and aggressive behavior have, therefore, been shown particularly for affective empathy, which refers to the sharing of the other’s emotions and is related to increased autonomic arousal, and to a lesser extent for cognitive empathy, which is based on the understanding of the other’s emotions (Blair, 2005, Smith, 2006, van Zonneveld et al., 2017, Winter et al., 2017). Affective empathy and cognitive empathy have been suggested to be separate but complementary aspects of empathy that rely on different neural networks (Decety, 2010, Decety et al., 2018, Singer, 2006, Smith, 2006). Affective empathy involves bottom-up processes such as emotional contagion and emotion recognition, which rely on the mirror neuron system (i.e., the inferior frontal gyrus and inferior parietal lobule) and regions related to pain experience (i.e., the anterior cingulate cortex and insula) (Shamay-Tsoory, 2011, Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2009). Cognitive empathy involves top-down processes including mentalizing, that is, the ability to understand or make inferences about another person’s affective and cognitive mental states (Shamay-Tsoory and Aharon-Peretz, 2007, Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2009, Shamay-Tsoory, 2011). These top-down circuits involve mainly prefrontal areas of the brain. Indicators of affective empathy can be observed from infancy onward given that newborns already show distress in response to the distress of others, which develops into showing empathic concern and helping behaviors during toddlerhood (Hoffman, 2000, McDonald and Messinger, 2011). Cognitive empathy develops from preschool onward, when perspective taking and emotion recognition abilities develop rapidly (Decety et al., 2018, Decety, 2010).

The association between empathy and aggression differs for affective and cognitive aspects of empathy. Studies in aggressive children (e.g., children with psychopathic traits, risk of aggressive behavior, and conduct disorder) have shown reduced autonomic responses to stimuli associated with the distress of another person (Anastassiou-Hadjicharalambous and Warden, 2008, Schwenck et al., 2012, van Zonneveld et al., 2017) and less self-reported affective empathy to emotional clips (Anastassiou-Hadjicharalambous and Warden, 2008, van Goozen et al., 2016, Winter et al., 2017). However, no association between impairments in cognitive empathy and aggression have been found in these studies (Schwenck et al., 2012, van Goozen et al., 2016, van Zonneveld et al., 2017). Furthermore, neuroimaging studies indicate that reduced volume of the insula, which is involved in affective empathy, is associated with antisocial behavior (Sterzer, Stadler, Poustka, & Kleinschmidt, 2007), that aggressive adolescents exhibit atypical neural affective empathic responses to other people’s distress (Decety, Michalska, Akitsuki, & Lahey, 2009), and that youths with psychopathic traits show less responsiveness in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is involved in the affective response to another’s pain (Marsh et al., 2013). However, no atypical neural processing regarding cognitive empathy has been found in adolescents with conduct disorder (O’Nions et al., 2014). In addition, elementary and middle school children involved in interventions targeting improvement of empathy have been found to become less aggressive, more prosocial, more assertive, and more empathic, which indicates that empathy is important in shaping social skills (Feshbach and Feshbach, 2011, Jagers et al., 2007, McMahon and Washburn, 2003, Schonert-Reichl et al., 2011).

Findings on the association between affective empathy and aggression are less clear for preschool children. Some studies indicated that reduced affective empathy as measured with dyadic peer play observations, videotaped vignettes, parent reports, teacher reports (Hughes et al., 2000, Strayer and Roberts, 2004), or reduced physiological reactivity to emotions of other people has been associated with higher levels of aggression (Miller et al., 2013, Zahn-Waxler et al., 1995). However, other studies that examined affective empathy with behavioral responses to simulated distress, parent reports (Hastings et al., 2000, MacQuiddy et al., 1987, Rhee et al., 2013, Zahn-Waxler et al., 1995), or physiological arousal in response to emotions of others (Gill and Calkins, 2003, Hastings et al., 2000) did not show an association between empathy and aggression. Finally, positive associations between affective empathy and aggression have been found in studies using verbal affective responses to slides showing affective situations, behavioral responses to a recording of a crying infant, or behavioral responses to simulated distress by the experimenter to examine empathy (Feshbach and Feshbach, 1969, Gill and Calkins, 2003).

There is a lack of research examining affective empathy and cognitive empathy simultaneously in relation to aggression at the preschool age. Two studies have addressed this issue in relation to constructs closely related to aggression. One study of 3- to 6-year-olds indicated that both affective empathy and cognitive empathy, according to teacher reports, were negatively associated with hostile roles in bullying (i.e., being a bully, assistant, or reinforcer) (Belacchi & Farina, 2012). In addition, parents of 3-to 13-year-olds reported that impaired affective empathy was associated with psychopathic traits (which include aggression), but only in boys, and that impaired cognitive empathy was associated with psychopathic traits in both sexes, although this association disappeared for boys during early adolescence (Dadds et al., 2009).

These two studies examining both affective empathy and cognitive empathy in young children used questionnaires to examine empathy. Although self-reports and parent reports of empathy are commonly used methods to assess empathy in older children, self-reports cannot be used in younger children because they are not yet capable of self-reflection and to report accurately on their feelings; moreover, parent reports may be biased (Zhou, Valiente, & Eisenberg, 2003). Measuring empathy from behavioral observation is commonly used and less biased, but may be influenced by the effect of emotional expressiveness (Zhou et al., 2003). More objective indices of affective empathy are provided by changes in physiological measures, such as heart rate, in response to other people’s emotional states (Bons et al., 2013, van Zonneveld et al., 2017, Zhou et al., 2003). Heart rate is considered a global measure of affective arousal, which is under the influence of the sympathetic branch and/or parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system (Berntson et al., 1994). Although heart rate responses to others’ emotional states have been used as an index of empathy, the association between heart rate responses and empathy is complex (Hastings and Miller, 2014, Hastings et al., 2014).

According to the polyvagal theory, both increases and decreases of arousal may facilitate empathy; a decrease in autonomic arousal (i.e., an increase in parasympathetic and/or decrease in sympathetic activity) in response to empathy might contribute to a calm bodily state and engagement in social behavior, which could comprise high levels of empathic concern (Porges and Furman, 2011, Porges, 2007). However, an increase in autonomic arousal contributes to the mobilization of resources, which might be needed to act in a concerned and prosocial way. In addition, heart rate deceleration has been associated with interest and an outward orientation of attention, such as empathic concern, whereas heart rate acceleration has been associated with a self-focus and personal distress in response to empathy in children and adults (Hastings et al., 2014, Zhou et al., 2003). Both empathic concern and personal distress result from affective empathy (i.e., sharing the feelings of other people), but empathic concern has been suggested to be more adaptive than personal distress (Eisenberg, 2010, Singer and Klimecki, 2014). Personal distress is most common during infancy, and empathic concern becomes more important during toddlerhood as a result of the development of emotion regulation (Decety, 2010, McDonald and Messinger, 2011).

Experimental studies in children indicate increases in heart rate (Anastassiou-Hadjicharalambous and Warden, 2007, Anastassiou-Hadjicharalambous and Warden, 2008) as well as decreases in heart rate (De Wied et al., 2009, van Zonneveld et al., 2017, Zahn-Waxler et al., 1995) in response to empathy-evoking clips. Behavioral measures of empathic concern in children have also been associated with both decreased heart rate (Holmgren et al., 1998, Zahn-Waxler et al., 1995) and increased heart rate (Anastassiou-Hadjicharalambous and Warden, 2007, Holmgren et al., 1998) in response to empathy-evoking clips. Overall, there seems to be an association between heart rate responses and empathy, but this association can be either positive or negative.

Social attention, which has generally been operationalized as attention to faces or more specifically to the eye and mouth regions, is necessary in order to recognize emotions of other people and can be considered a prerequisite of empathy (Bons et al., 2013). Therefore, social attention might be necessary for a negative association between empathy and aggression to occur. Conversely, high levels of social attention might dampen the effect of difficulties in empathy on aggression. Attending to faces of others may support children with difficulties in empathy to recognize emotional expressions of others and, therefore, to inhibit aggressive responses (Bons et al., 2013). For example, fear recognition increases when children showing aggressive behavior and callous–unemotional traits are instructed to attend to the eyes (Dadds et al., 2006, Dadds et al., 2008). However, this effect is not found in children with aggressive behavior without callous–unemotional traits. Despite the importance of social attention for sharing and understanding emotions of others, research on the role of social attention in relation to empathy and aggression during early childhood is scarce (Bons et al., 2013, Wegrzyn et al., 2017). One study indicated that 5-year-olds who were high in empathy fixated more quickly on the eyes and mouth and did so for longer times, and also more frequently, in response to painful expressions (Yan, Pei, & Su, 2017). In addition, impaired social attention may also be a risk factor for aggression given that attention to the eyes has been shown to be reduced in children (8–15 years) with aggressive behavior and callous–unemotional traits (Dadds et al., 2008). However, this effect was not found in children with aggressive behavior without callous–unemotional traits. In addition, no impairment in attention to the eyes was found in children (8–12 years) at risk for criminal behavior despite the use of an eye-tracking paradigm with dynamic social stimuli rather than static images (van Zonneveld et al., 2017). Dynamic social stimuli have been shown to provide higher ecological validity and a more sensitive measure of social attention than static stimuli (Chevallier et al., 2015). Cleary, investigating social attention simultaneously with empathy and aggression is important in order to clarify the associations among social attention, empathy, and aggression.

In sum, the associations between affective and cognitive empathy and aggression during early childhood remain unclear. Theoretical models (Blair, 2006, Smith, 2006) and literature on adolescents and adults (van Zonneveld et al., 2017, Winter et al., 2017) indicate negative associations between affective empathy and aggression but no association between cognitive empathy and aggression. However, during early childhood, positive associations (Feshbach and Feshbach, 1969, Gill and Calkins, 2003), negative associations (Hughes et al., 2000, Miller et al., 2013, Strayer and Roberts, 2004, Zahn-Waxler et al., 1995) and null results (Hastings et al., 2000, MacQuiddy et al., 1987, Rhee et al., 2013) were found regarding the association between affective empathy and aggression, whereas negative associations were found between cognitive empathy and aggression (Belacchi and Farina, 2012, Dadds et al., 2009). Furthermore, social attention might be negatively associated with empathy (Yan et al., 2017) and aggression (Dadds et al., 2008) during childhood, but the evidence is scarce and it remains unknown whether social attention may play a moderating role in the effects of affective and cognitive empathy on aggression.

The current study aimed to examine, first, whether affective empathy and cognitive empathy are associated with aggression. Based on previous studies during early childhood, we expected both affective empathy and cognitive empathy to be negatively associated with aggression (Belacchi and Farina, 2012, Dadds et al., 2009). Second, we aimed to clarify the role of social attention in empathy and aggression, specifically, whether social attention moderates the association between empathy and aggression. Social attention was expected to be positively associated with affective and cognitive empathy and to be negatively affected with aggression (Bons et al., 2013, Dadds et al., 2008, Yan et al., 2017). In addition, the potential moderating role of social attention for the association between empathy and aggression was explored because we had no hypothesis about the direction of this effect. It is important to examine the association among empathy, social attention, and aggression during the preschool period because that is a critical time for the development of emotion regulation and inhibition of aggression (Eisenberg et al., 2010, Lovett and Sheffield, 2007, Tremblay et al., 2004). During the second and third years of life, the majority of children show aggressive behavior and then generally learn to inhibit this behavior during the preschool years (Alink et al., 2006, Tremblay et al., 2004). Children who fail to learn to inhibit aggression are at risk for aggression during adolescence and adulthood, and empathy and social attention are important targets for interventions that aim to prevent or reduce aggression (Broidy et al., 2003, Feshbach and Feshbach, 2011). The current study adds to the literature by examining social attention simultaneously with affective empathy and cognitive empathy in relation to aggression in preschool children. Furthermore, objective measures of social attention (eye tracking) and affective empathy (heart rate response) were obtained.

Section snippets

Participants

The current study is a follow-up to the Mother- Infant Neurodevelopment Study in Leiden, The Netherlands (MINDS-Leiden), which is an ongoing longitudinal study into neurobiological and neurocognitive predictors of early behavior problems. MINDS-Leiden and the follow-up were approved by the ethics committee of the Department of Education and ChildStudies at the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Leiden University (ECPW-2011/025) and by the medical research ethics committee at Leiden

Preliminary analyses

Demographic data and descriptive statistics for heart rate response, emotion understanding, attention to emotional faces, and aggression are shown in Table 1. No sex differences were present for these variables. Regarding the emotional clips, 64% of the children recognized the happy and sad emotions and 62% of the children recognized the fearful emotion, which indicates that the clips were perceived as happy, sad, and fearful by children aged 45 months.

Discussion

The current study aimed to examine associations between indicators of affective and cognitive empathy, social attention, and aggression in 3-year-old children. We expected affective and cognitive empathy to be negatively associated with aggression. Social attention was expected to be positively associated with affective and cognitive empathy and to be negatively associated with aggression. In addition, the moderating role of social attention for the association between empathy and aggression

Acknowledgments

This study is part of MINDS (Mother–Infant Neurodevelopment Study)–Leiden (principal investigators: H. Swaab and S. H. M. van Goozen). The authors thank all families for their participation and thank the research assistants who contributed to the data collection. This study was funded by Grant 056-23-001 from the National Initiative for Brain and Cognition Research (NIHC), which is supported and coordinated by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

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