Do Infants Really Experience Emotional Contagion?

Shared Reality Can Reduce Stressor Reactivity

When a person faces a stressor alongside someone else, do they get more or less stressed when the other person agrees that the situation is stressful? While an equally stressed partner could plausibly amplify stress by making the situation seem more real and worthy of distress, we find that social validation during co-experienced stressors reduces reactivity. Specifically, the psychological experience of shared reality calms some people down. In Study 1, 70 undergraduate females who jointly faced a stressful event with someone else reported feeling less anxious when the other person felt the same way about the stressor, relative to when the other person appraised the situation in the opposite way or provided no indication of their appraisal. These findings were reflected in participants' physiological reactivity, especially in the parasympathetic nervous system. In Study 2, we generalize these findings to co-experienced stressors in the daily lives of 102 heteronormative romantic couples in the New York City area. In line with tend-and-befriend theory, we found that shared reality during co-experienced stressors reduced anxiety for almost all females (99% of the sample) and for a minority of males (42% of the sample). Together, these findings unify major theories in health and social psychology by implying that shared reality reduces stressor reactivity, and that this effect is partially moderated by sex.

Parent-to-Child Anxiety Transmission Through Dyadic Social Dynamics: A Dynamic Developmental Model

The intergenerational transmission of psychopathology is one of the strongest known risk factors for childhood disorder and may be a malleable target for prevention and intervention. Anxious parents have distinct parenting profiles that impact socioemotional development, and these parenting effects may result in broad alterations to the biological and cognitive functioning of their children. Better understanding the functional mechanisms by which parental risk is passed on to children can provide (1) novel markers of risk for socioemotional difficulties, (2) specific targets for intervention, and (3) behavioral and biological indices of treatment response. We propose a developmental model in which dyadic social dynamics serve as a key conduit in parent-to-child transmission of anxiety. Dyadic social dynamics capture the moment-to-moment interactions between parent and child that occur on a daily basis. In shaping the developmental trajectory from familial risk to actual symptoms, dyadic processes act on mechanisms of risk that are evident prior to, and in the absence of, any eventual disorder onset. First, we discuss dyadic synchrony or the moment-to-moment coordination between parent and child within different levels of analysis, including neural, autonomic, behavioral, and emotional processes. Second, we discuss how overt emotion modeling of distress is observed and internalized by children and later reflected in their own behavior. Thus, unlike synchrony, this is a more sequential process that cuts across levels of analysis. We also discuss maladaptive cognitive and affective processing that is often evident with increases in child anxiety symptoms. Finally, we discuss additional moderators (e.g., parent sex, child fearful temperament) that may impact dyadic processes. Our model is proposed as a conceptual framework for testing hypotheses regarding dynamic processes that may ultimately guide novel treatment approaches aimed at intervening on dyadically linked biobehavioral mechanisms before symptom onset.

Caring babies: Concern for others in distress during infancy

Concern for distressed others is a highly valued human capacity, but little is known about its early ontogeny. Theoretical accounts of empathy development have emphasized stages, but this has been called into question. This study sheds new light on four key issues: onset, consistency, development, and predictive power of early manifestations of concern for others. Three-month-old Israei infants (N = 165) were followed longitudinally at ages 6, 12, and 18 months, and their observed responses to others' distress were assessed. Concern for distressed others was seen early in the first year of life, long before previous theories assumed. Empathic concern was moderately consistent across both situation and age, from as early as 3 months. Concern for others grew only modestly with age, plateauing during the second year, whereas prosocial behavior increased rapidly during the second year. Early individual differences in concern for others predicted later prosocial behavior on behalf of distressed others. Findings underscore the early roots of caring, and appear to refute assumptions of prior stage theories of empathy development, by showing that concern for others develops much earlier and more gradually than previously assumed.

Toddlers' Self-Recognition and Progression From Goal- to Emotion-Based Helping: A Longitudinal Study

Research has typically used cross-sectional designs to draw conclusions on the development of helping. This study aimed to examine the development of instrumental and empathic helping behaviors as they emerge, and assess how self-recognition might moderate this progression. Seventy-two children (14- to 25-months at T1) were assessed over four monthly sessions. Participants' individual response patterns showed instrumental helping to be a necessary precursor to empathic helping for 55.77%-67.92% of children who helped during the study. Self-recognition emerged before empathic but not instrumental helping, yet did not directly influence helping behavior.

Is psychology suffering from an epidemic of “contagion”? Moving from metaphors to theoretically derived concepts and methods in the study of social influences

The term “contagion” has become increasingly popular as an omnibus catch-all to depict all kinds of mutual influences between people of equal status (or “peers”). We argue that some of these influences may qualify as “contagion,” but others denote alternative processes better described, for example, as exchange, transactions, or diffusion. To transform the term contagion from a loose metaphor to a precise and empirically useful concept, we propose that the paradigmatic case of contagious diseases can be used to identify multiple criteria that a social process must meet in order to qualify as contagion. Based on these essential elements, we describe the developmental signature of contagion, contrast contagion pathways with other temporal pathways of influence, and highlight empirical strategies needed to detect contagion. Finally, we conclude that interpretations about the nature of social influences and their labels should follow from (and not precede) empirical identification of the specific mechanisms that orchestrate transmission.

Lifespan differences in emotional contagion while watching emotion-eliciting videos

Previous research has examined empathic concern by presenting toddlers with a sad stimulus and examining their emotional response, with the conclusion that toddlers display empathy. Yet, such research has failed to include basic control conditions involving some other aversive stimulus such as white noise. Nor has it compared toddlers to adults to examine potential development in empathy. In the present study, we showed toddlers and adults four video types: infant crying, infant laughing, infant babbling, and a neutral infant accompanied by white noise. We then coded happiness and sadness while viewing the videos, and created a difference score (happiness minus sadness), testing 52 toddlers and 61 adults. Whereas adults showed more sadness towards infant crying than any other stimulus, toddlers' response to crying and white noise was similar. Thus, the toddler response to crying was comparable to previous studies (slight sadness), but was no different to white noise and was significantly reduced relative to adults. As such, toddlers' response seemed to be better characterized as a reaction to an aversive stimulus rather than empathy.

Empathy is not in our genes

In academic and public life empathy is seen as a fundamental force of morality - a psychological phenomenon, rooted in biology, with profound effects in law, policy, and international relations. But the roots of empathy are not as firm as we like to think. The matching mechanism that distinguishes empathy from compassion, envy, schadenfreude, and sadism is a product of learning. Here I present a dual system model that distinguishes Empathy¹, an automatic process that catches the feelings of others, from Empathy², controlled processes that interpret those feelings. Research with animals, infants, adults and robots suggests that the mechanism of Empathy¹, emotional contagion, is constructed in the course of development through social interaction. Learned Matching implies that empathy is both agile and fragile. It can be enhanced and redirected by novel experience, and broken by social change.