EMPATHY AND ALTRUISM IN CHILDREN

Exploratory Study on Measuring Emotional Empathy

Abstract

The present study measured children's emotional empathy appearing on their face, at the sight of a victim's distress and examined the relation of emotional empathy to a sharing behavior with the victim. Twenty fifth-grade children watched a videotape of a victim appealing for the damages of a disaster. While watching the videotape presentation, the observing subjects' facial expressions to the victim were videotaped unobtrusively. Subsequently, subjects had to play a game and then share the game sheet, which had to be exchanged for tokens later, towards either themselves or the victim whenever completed. The coding of facial expressions was based on MAX and AFFEX by Izard and his colleagues (1979, 1980). The results showed that the subjects who expressed emotional empathy significantly shared more game sheets with the victim than the other subjects. These results were discussed in relation to the usefulness of a measurement of emotional empathy based on facial expressions and on the hypothesis that empathy motivates altruistic behavior in children.