OCR Text |
Show COLLEGE OF SOCIAL & BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH ABSTRACTS A PATH TO EMPATHY Diana Thai (Sarah A. Stone) Department of Psychology University of Utah The development of empathy is a crucial milestone for humans. By age 5, children should have developed empathy, including compassion and helping behaviors for others. The foundation for empathy may begin earlier in a child's life as the child experiences positive interactions with his/her mother and security in the dyad relationship. The proposed study is collaboration between BYU's School of Family Life and University of Utah's Department of Psychology. This study employed a longitudinal design to study 47 mother-child dyads. Data was collected at age 1, 2, 3 and 5 years of age. Mother-child interactions (co-regulation) and the quality of the mother-child relationship (attachment) may show a pathway to empathy development in young children. I expected that positive co-regulation patterns at 5 years would predict greater empathy at age 5 and negative co-regulation patterns would predict lower empathy. These hypotheses were not supported in the data. In addition, I expected that secure attachment would predict higher amounts of empathic responses at age 5. This finding was supported by the data. An unexpected finding is that females have higher amounts of pro-social behaviors, but males and females do not differ on empathetic behaviors. |