Before explaining the development of empathy in childhood, let us locate the origin of this term.
The origin of the concept: empathy ? derives from what the philosophy of Scottish illustration has called ‘sympathy’. David Hume, in his treatise on human nature, and Adam Smith describe it as a natural means of communication.
- It is this definition that will serve as the basis for neuroscience.
- Developmental psychology.
- And social psychology.
- The development of empathy in childhood has provided very curious data on evolutionary aspects as a species.
An idea arises: our socialization is not originally due to empathy, evolutionary biology shows us that altruistic behavior appeared before the acquisition of this potential.
Some species that lack empathy exhibit such behaviors, as is the case with social insects, such as bees that, when they die shortly after stinging their target, sacrifice themselves to protect the swarm. The link between empathy and altruism is not simple.
Lipps’s work (1903) focused on the difference between the terms sympathy and empathy. Researchers in developmental psychology defined the concept of empathy as a multidimensional construct, taking into account the cognitive component.
This includes recognizing and understanding the emotions of others and the emotional component of sharing affection or indirect response.
On the other hand, since the 1990s, empathy has been studied from emotional intelligence, highlighting, in the first place, the model of Mayer and Salovey (1997).
Empathy is seen as an element that includes the perception of other people’s emotions, as well as understanding one’s emotions.
Another relevant model was that of Bar-On’s socio-emotional intelligence (1997, 2000), which proposes that empathy is a component of a factor called interpersonal skills, and is seen as the ability to be aware and understand the emotions, feelings and ideas of others. .
These two models are not as inclusive as those proposed in developmental psychology, in them there is no room for the emotional component, focusing more on the cognitive component.
Today, Batson and his colleagues proposed a distinction between perspective and empathy. Perspective taking appears to be the key precursor to specifically empathetic reactions (Batson et al. , 1992).
Hoffman, the main theorist of the development of empathy in childhood, recognizes two dimensions to study in empathy: the recognition of the internal states of others and the indirect affective response.
Hoffman’s model explains how empathy begins and develops in children. He states that his “central idea is the integration of affection and cognition, and goes beyond an approximation to the processing of information. “
He argues that empathy develops in a similar way to states of social cognitive development. This process begins with an empathetic global feeling in which the child does not have a clear distinction between him and the other, and is confused as to the source of that feeling.
From then on, it goes through several phases to the most advanced, which combines what has been achieved in previous phases.
In later stages, a person can sympathize with another person knowing that they are physical entities other than the self and that they have internal states independent of the individual.
A mature level of empathy allows the individual to be more influenced by the condition of life of the other than by the immediate situation. According to Hoffman, there must be a parallelism of feelings and affections with thoughts, moral principles, and behavioral tendencies.
The development of early childhood empathy for humans, according to Hoffman, has four steps:
It includes the person’s first year of life and consists of the child still not seeing others as different from him.
Therefore, the pain she perceives in the other is confused with her own unpleasant feelings, as if they were passing on to herself, for example, a baby who, when she sees her mother cry, wipes her eyes.
Another example: an 11-month-old girl sees another girl fall and starts crying, is she looking at him?Victim, for a moment, then sticks his thumb in his mouth and hides his face in his mother’s lap. A common reaction when it falls.
This is the second year of life, and the child is aware that it is the other person who goes through the unpleasant situation, however, assumes that the internal states that the other lives feel them himself.
A 13-month-old boy who sees a sad adult offers him his favorite toy or even a child of the same age runs to find his own mother to comfort the other child who was crying, even if he is the child’s mother. last one is present.
This goes from the second to the third year, the child is aware that the feelings he experiences are different from those of the other person, being able to respond to them in a non-self-centered way.
At this point, you are already able to understand that the other person’s intentions and needs are different from yours and that therefore that person’s emotions may also differ from your own, and so, for example, He returns able to console himself.
Includes the final period of childhood. The feelings of others are perceived not only as reactions of the moment, but also as expressions of their experience of life in general.
In other words, they react differently to states of transient and chronic pain because they take into account the general state of the other.
The child develops the ability to be empathetic with the living conditions of a culture, class or group of individuals. This combination is the most advanced form of empathy and can be refined with a child’s cognitive development.