Origins of Empathy: A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Early Empathy Development

Abstract

Empathy – sharing and understanding others’ emotions – is an essential part of navigating our social lives but our understanding of its ontogeny is limited and biased towards Western samples. Furthermore, it is unclear to what extent associated socio-emotional skills, like emotion regulation, contribute to its development. Across four empirical chapters, this thesis aims to investigate the early development of empathy and emotion regulation, using a multi-method, longitudinal approach, with cross-cultural data collected in two sites in Uganda (rural and urban), as well as in the UK across the first two years of life.
Using the novel method of infrared thermal imaging, I showed in chapter 2 that infants exhibit behavioural and physiological markers of emotional contagion in response to peer emotions. In chapter 3, I then investigated emotion regulation and its relationship to emotional contagion. I compared infants’ negative reactivity to the still-face paradigm to the same infants’ emotional contagion markers in response to peer distress as described in chapter 2. I found that, across sites, better regulation during the still-face paradigm was linked with less negative emotional contagion in response to peer distress. Because infants from rural Uganda overall showed better emotion regulation skills overall, in chapter 4 I then used naturalistic observations to investigate this further. I found that this difference may stem from variation in maternal soothing of distressed infants. Although rural Ugandan mothers were slower and more physical in their soothing, their infants recovered faster from distress. Lastly, in chapter 5, I longitudinally examined infant empathic responses to a distressed adult. Overall, although Ugandan and UK infants showed the same frequency of empathic responses, Ugandan infants comforted in response to more explicit distress cues.
Overall, my thesis has shown that infants across three cultural settings show empathy towards others in the first two years of life but that cross-cultural variation in emotion socialisation may lead to differences in not if, but how empathy is expressed.