Toddlers’ Empathic Behavior: The Role Of Emotion Regulation, Language, and Maternal Emotional Style

During toddlerhood responses to others’ distress transform from an overwhelming personal distress reaction to a more other oriented empathic reaction that gives rise to precocious prosocial behaviors (Zahn-Waxler et al., 1992). There also appears to be a transformation from concern for the self to a capability for concern for the other, along with the development of self-other differentiation, perspective taking, and emotion regulation (Knafo et al., 2008). This study aimed to deepen the relation between toddlers’ empathic behavior and both internal and social factors, such as emotion regulation, language ability, emotion knowledge and maternal emotion style, all found to play a crucial role in the development of positive social skills in early childhood (Denham, 2007). Participants were 335 toddlers (156 girls), with a mean age of 28.79 months (SD = 3.55; range: 20-36). They came from middle-class families and were recruited in 34 nursery schools in the north of Italy. Their mothers were asked to fill in a battery of questionnaires assessing their children’s empathic-prosocial behavior, emotion regulation, language ability, and their own emotional style. All the children were tested for their emotion knowledge through the Affective Knowledge Task (Denham, 2006). Results showed significant correlations between toddlers’ empathic and prosocial behavior and their emotion regulation (r=.40; p<.0001), language ability (r=.22; p<.001), and coaching maternal emotional style (r=.17; p=.002), when controlling for age and gender. Toddlers’ emotion knowledge was found to be positively correlated with emotion regulation and language, and negatively correlated with dismissing maternal style. Stepwise regression analyses revealed that positive emotion regulation is the best indicator of empathic and prosocial behavior in toddlerhood (R2=.20; β=.37; p<.0001). Our findings suggest the importance of implementing at a very early age emotion-based programs, especially focused on emotion regulation, in order to promote children’s empathic and prosocial actions toward others