The Developmental Trajectory of Empathy and Its Association with Early Symptoms of Psychopathology in Children with and without Hearing Loss

Abstract

Empathy enables people to share, understand, and show concern for others’ emotions. However, this capacity may be more difficult to acquire for children with hearing loss, due to limited social access, and the effect of hearing on empathic maturation has been unexplored. This four-wave longitudinal study investigated the development of empathy in children with and without hearing loss, and how this development is associated with early symptoms of psychopathology. Seventy-one children with hearing loss and cochlear implants (CI), and 272 typically-hearing (TH) children, participated (aged 1–5 years at Time 1). Parents rated their children’s empathic skills (affective empathy, attention to others’ emotions, prosocial actions, and emotion acknowledgment) and psychopathological symptoms (internalizing and externalizing behaviors). Children with CI and TH children were rated similarly on most of the empathic skills. Yet, fewer prosocial actions were reported in children with CI than in TH children. In both groups, affective empathy decreased with age, while prosocial actions and emotion acknowledgment increased with age and stabilized when children entered primary schools. Attention to emotions increased with age in children with CI, yet remained stable in TH children. Moreover, higher levels of affective empathy, lower levels of emotion acknowledgment, and a larger increase in attention to emotions over time were associated with more psychopathological symptoms in both groups. These findings highlight the importance of social access from which children with CI can learn to process others’ emotions more adaptively. Notably, interventions for psychopathology that tackle empathic responses may be beneficial for both groups, alike.

Empathy and psychopathology in children and adolescents: the role of parental mental illness and emotion regulation

“…Particularly, affective empathy is positively associated with internalizing symptoms. This association seems to apply not only to children and adolescents in clinical ( 26 , 27 ) but also to non-clinical ( 28 – 30 ) samples. In contrast, studies investigating cognitive empathy are less consistent.…”

Toward feeling, understanding, and caring: The development of empathy in young autistic children

“…This study was part of a larger-scaled longitudinal research in the Netherlands on the socioemotional development of preschool children with limited access to the social world, including children with hearing loss ( Tsou et al, 2021 ), with developmental language disorder ( Rieffe & Wiefferink, 2017 ), and with autism ( Li et al, 2021 ). The total sample of the larger-scaled research included 73 Dutch children with autism (65 boys) and 418 Dutch children (226 boys) without autism.…”

“…Therefore, a crucial step in the empathy process is to keep one’s own emotions under control and to switch the focus of attention to another (“attention to others”) ( Bird & Viding, 2014 ). For young children, not immersed in one’s own distress but paying close attention to another is a starting point for understanding others’ emotions (“emotion acknowledgment”) ( Tsou et al, 2021 ). Accordingly, longitudinal studies examining empathy development in early childhood found that, while emotion contagion increased only slightly or remained stable, attention to others and emotion acknowledgment kept developing with age ( Davidov et al, 2013 ; Tousignant et al, 2017 ).…”

Editorial: Quality of life in young cochlear implant recipients: Are there controlling factors and regional differences?

“…Early application of CI facilitates spoken language acquisition (Percy-Smith et al, 2008 ; Peters et al, 2010 ; Kronenberger et al, 2020 ; Sharma et al, 2020 ; Romano et al, 2021 ; Boerrigter et al, 2022 ) and promotes participation in mainstream education (Huber et al, 2008 , 2014 ; Huber and Kipman, 2012 ; Sarant et al, 2015 ). In addition, CIs seem conducive to the psychosocial prerequisites (e.g., empathy) for social participation (Sarant et al, 2015 ; Boerrigter et al, 2019 , 2021 ; Tsou et al, 2021 ). In children, the use of CI can at least partly reverse the effects of hearing loss on the brain (Lee et al, 2020 ; Lieu et al, 2020 ; Sharma et al, 2020 ; Wang et al, 2021 ).…”