An EEG/ERP investigation of the development of empathy in early and middle childhood

Abstract

Empathic arousal is the first ontogenetic building block of empathy to appear during infancy and early childhood. As development progresses, empathic arousal becomes associated with an increasing ability to differentiate between self and other, which is a critical aspect of mature empathetic ability (Decety and Jackson, 2004). This allows for better regulation of contagious distress and understanding others mental states. In the current study, we recorded electroencephalographic event-related potentials and mu suppression induced by short visual animations that depicted painful situations in 57 typically developing children aged between 3 and 9 years as well as 15 young adults. Results indicate that the difference wave of an early automatic component (N200), indexing empathic arousal, showed an age-related decrease in amplitude. In contrast, the difference wave of late-positive potentials (LPP), associated with cognitive appraisal, showed an age-related gain. Only early LPP was detected in children, whereas both early and late LPP were observed in adults. Furthermore, as compared with adults, children showed stronger mu suppression when viewing both painful and non-painful stimuli. These findings provide neurophysiological support for the development of empathy during childhood, as indicated by a gradual decrease in emotional arousal and an increase in cognitive appraisal with age.

Precursors to morality in development as a complex interplay between neural, socioenvironmental, and behavioral facets

“…Moreover, consistent with studies in older children, infants' early, automatic, and later controlled time-locked neural responses to the perception of social interactions of others were expected in the CMST (21,22). Infants were hypothesized to show greater amplitudes for good actions than bad actions in the Nc component, a central negativity between 300 and 500 ms poststimulus that has been previously linked to automatic resource allocation.…”

“…For example, examining the spatiotemporal dynamics of the neural processing when young children view social interactions can help us to better understand the contribution of domain-general processes to early moral thought. Our current knowledge of the brain circuits involved in the development of moral cognition is based on a limited number of studies with young children using electroencephalography (21)(22)(23), functional MRI (24), and lesion studies (25). Due to the methodological constraints of most neuroimaging methods, no study has yet investigated the link between the online neural processing of the perception of prosocial and antisocial others and actual moral preferences and prosocial behaviors in infants and toddlers, as well as their link to parental values.…”

Empathy, Justice, and Moral Behavior

“…It is often viewed as the simplest form of empathy and can be observed across a multitude of species from birds to rodents and humans (Edgar, Nicol, Clark, and Paul 2012), and appears very early in ontogeny (Cheng, Chen, and Decety 2014). Often, affective sharing is synonymous with emotional contagion.…”

“…These include an early automatic attentional salience (N2) and late positive potentials (LPP) associated with affective arousal and affective appraisal of the stimuli, respectively, which are detectable as of 3 years of age (Cheng et al 2014; Cheng, Hung, and Decety 2012; Sheng and Han 2012). Numerous functional magnetic resonance imaging studies (fMRI) with both children (Decety and Michalska 2010) and adults (Lamm, Decety, and Singer 2011) have reliably demonstrated that when participants watch (or even imagine) another person experiencing pain, sadness or emotional distress, brain regions involved in the first-hand physical pain are activated.…”

Empathy as a driver of prosocial behaviour: highly conserved neurobehavioural mechanisms across species

“…In one study using electroencephalography and event-related potentials (EEG/ERPs), children aged 3-9 years were shown stimuli depicting physical injuries to people. The authors demonstrated that even children this young show both an early automatic component (N200), which reflects empathic arousal, and a late-positive potential, indexing cognitive reappraisal, with the latter showing an age-related gain [47]. One cross-sectional developmental functional MRI study tested participants ranging from 7 to 40 years of age while they watched video clips of individuals being physically injured [48].…”