UNDERSTANDING HOW CHILDREN DEVELOP EMPATHY

The capacity to notice the distress of others, and to be moved by it, can be a critical component of what is calledprosocial behavior, actions that benefit others: individuals, groups or society as a whole.

Dr. Eisenberg, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, draws a distinction between empathy and sympathy:
Empathy is experiencing the same emotion or highly similar emotion to what the other person is feeling.

Sympathy is feeling concern or sorrow for the other person.

The ingredients of prosocial behavior, from kindness to philanthropy, are more complex and varied. They include:
·         the ability to perceive others’ distress
·         the sense of self that helps sort out your own identity and feelings
·         the regulatory skills that prevent distress so severe it turns to aversion, and
·         the cognitive and emotional understanding of the value of helping.

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Prosocial behaviour is motivational
Scott Huettel, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke, described prosocial behavior was essentially motivational: It feels good to help other people.

Experimental studies have shown that the same brain region that is activated when people win money for themselves is active when they give to charity — that is, that there is a kind of neurologic “reward” built into the motivational system of the brain.

“Charitable giving can activate the same pleasure-reward centers, the dopaminergic centers, in the brain that are very closely tied to habit formation,” said Bill Harbaugh, an economist at the University of Oregon who studies altruism. “This suggests it might be possible to foster the same sorts of habits for charitable giving you see with other sorts of habits.”
Prosocial behaviour is based on social cognition
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The other theory of prosocial behavior, Dr. Huettel said, is based on social cognition —the recognition that other people have needs and goals. The two theories aren’t mutually exclusive: Cognitive understanding accompanied by a motivational reward reinforces prosocial behavior.
But shaping prosocial behavior is a tricky business. For instance, certain financial incentives seem to deter prosocial impulses, a phenomenon called reward undermining, Dr. Huettel said.

Consider that in the United States, historically, blood donors could be paid, but not in Britain. And the British donated more blood. “When you give extrinsic motivations, they can supplant the intrinsic ones,” he said.

Fostering prosocial behavior in children, from kindness on to charity

Parental modeling is important, of course; sympathy and compassion should be part of children’s experience long before they know the words.
Explain how other people feel. Reflect the child’s feelings, but also point out, look, “you hurt someone’s feelings.”

Don’t offer material rewards for prosocial behavior, but do offer opportunities to do good — opportunities that the child will see as voluntary. And help children see themselves and frame their own behavior as generous, kind, helpful, as the mother in my exam room did.

Working with a child’s temperament, taking advantage of an emerging sense of self and increasing cognitive understanding of the world and helped by the reward centers of the brain, parents can try to foster that warm glow and the worldview that goes with it.

Empathy, sympathy, compassion, kindness and charity begin at home, and very early.

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