In what way are empathy and prosociality related?

Empathy involves the vicarious experience of another person’s distress, which can precipitate prosocial acts of help. Both empathy and prosociality are fundamental to moral and social behavior. Children’s empathic concern for others and displays of prosocial behavior emerge by the second year of life. Research towards deficits in these processes to explain antisocial behaviour has focused on callous-unemotional (CU) behaviours.

How can callous-unemotional behaviours develop during childhood?

Callous-unemotional behaviours in childhood are characterised by low empathy, low guilt, uncaring about others and low emotional responsively. It has been established that CU behaviours assessed as young as age 3 predict future behaviour problems. CU behaviours are characterised by homotypic continuity, which means that they remain constant over development.

A large developmental literature has linked parenting to the development of empathy and prosocial behaviour. Warm parenting is thought to encourage and scaffold emotional expression and sensitivity, and increase the likelihood that children internalize parental messages about empathy and prosociality. Negative parent-child relationships appear to amplify the risk that the development of empathy and conscience could fail. Greater parental warmth predicts decreases in CU behaviours across the preschool period, whereas parental harshness at age 2 predicts increases in CU behaviours at ages 4. However, also broader negative contexts can undermine child socioemotional development via effects on parenting. At the same time, genetically-informed studies suggest at least moderate heritability of CU behaviors in early childhood. Parenting is critical to the development of early CU behaviours. CU behaviors develop through a complex interplay between genes and environment.

What are temperament precursors of early childhood CU behaviour?

Across several recent studies, early temperamental markers of CU behaviors have been identified. For example, children with CU behaviors show lower affection and eye contact with parents. Impairments in attending to, recognizing, and responding to interpersonal emotions as early as infancy may increase risk for CU behaviors. These impairments could contribute to deficits in the development of affective empathy. Empathy is commonly divided between emotionally resonating with the feelings of another, referred to as affective empathy, versus understanding the perspective of another, referred to as cognitive empathy. Evidence suggests that children high on CU behaviours have intact cognitive but impaired affective empathy both during the preschool period and in late-childhood.

In addition to emotional responsivity, a second temperament relevant for understanding CU behaviours is low fear. Early fearlessness confers low arousal to threat, which undermines learning about the consequences of behaviour, thus increasing risk for CU behaviours.

What interactions between person and context have an influence on the development of early CU behaviour?

Drawing together research on parenting and child temperament, studies suggest that interactions between child temperament and parenting are critical in the development of moral emotions. Inherited child characteristics interact with caregiving to shape the development of empathy and prosocial behaviour and that person-context fit may be particularly important in the development of prosocial behaviours. Child temperament interacts with parental caregiving to increase or buffer risk for CU behaviours.

What developmental model of early CU behaviour can be proposed?

Based on this literature, we propose that early CU behaviours arise in the context of inherited temperament risk for both low interpersonal emotional sensitivity and fearlessness. It is hypothesized that CU behaviours arise from the interaction of two heritable pathways:

1. Inherited low interpersonal emotional sensitivity sets the foundation for failure to develop affective empathy, operationalized via low emotional contagion in infancy, and fewer facial or verbal expressions of concern for others’ distress, low positive affect, and eye contact deficits from age 2 onwards.

2. Inherited fearlessness sets the foundation for a failure to develop behavioral inhibition to threat, including non-social threat and social threat, which lead to high approach, reward dominance, and difficulty learning from punishment.