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... Bu indirgeme ölçmede kolaylık sağlasa da elde edilen sonuçların güvenilirlik derecesini etkilemektedir (Ianotti, 1979). Araştırmalarda, yeni doğan bir bebeğin başka bir bebeğin ağlamasına karşı daha güçlü bir ağlamayla tepki verdiğini gözlenmiştir (Martin ve Clark, 1982). Bebeklerde gözlenen bu durumun, ağlama sesinin doğasından dolayı tetiklenmediği, aksine empatik tepkinin çok erken bir belirtisi olduğu ifade edilebilir. ...
Bu çalışmanın amacı, yetişkin bireylerde küsme davranışı şiddetinin kendilerinde algıladıkları empati düzeyi ve benlik saygısı ile ilişkisinin incelenmesidir. Araştırma örneklemi, Türkiye’nin farklı illerinde ikamet eden 18 yaş ve üzeri 343 yetişkin bireyden oluşmaktadır. Araştırmada veri toplama araçları olarak; Bilgilendirilmiş̧ Gönüllü Onam Formu, Benlik Saygısı Değerlendirme Ölçeği-Kısa Formu, Empatik Eğilim Ölçeği-(EEÖ) ve araştırmacı tarafından araştırmanın amacına yönelik olarak oluşturan küsme anketi uygulanmıştır. Araştırma kapsamında tüm verilerin anlamlılık düzeyi p
... It is interesting to note that newborn infants exhibit reactive crying primarily to another infant's cry, but not to a synthetically produced cries or to unpleasant, non-social sounds (Simner, 1971;Sagi & Hoffman, 1976). Such findings suggest that there might be something unique about the human (infant) cry that triggers newborn infants' reactive crying that can not be completely explained by conditioning or emotional contagion (e.g., Martin & Clark, 1982). ...
Two laboratory assessments were conducted with toddlers aged 18 and 30 months and their parents to examine how toddlers react to a stranger showing pain and distress, with 247 and 216 families participating in the 1st and 2nd assessments, respectively. Three main research questions were addressed: (1) whether pathways between parental characteristics and child reactions were mediated through child self-regulation, (2) whether child self-regulation moderated pathways between parental characteristics and child reactions, and (3) whether child emotion knowledge moderated pathways between child self-regulation and child reactions.
Results were consistent with the notion that child self-regulation partially mediated the pathways from parental support and parental distress to child help-seeking and distressed reactions. As expected, parental support fostered, whereas parental distress (even when accounting for consistency in measures over time) impaired, child self-regulatory capacities. Surprisingly, vagal suppression (theorized to index emotion regulation) did not cohere with other measures of self-regulation. However, vagal measures were related to child reactions (with findings often differing by sex). The patterns of relations suggest that baseline vagal measures tapped surgency or approach reactions (e.g., physical or verbal help for the distressed stranger) rather than avoidance or inhibition to novel and distressing situations (e.g., help-seeking from parent or personal distress). Also unexpected was the finding that child self-regulation was positively linked to help-seeking and personal distress. However, auxiliary analyses revealed that measurement of child self-regulation likely captured aspects of reactive behavioral inhibition. Nonetheless, results suggest that parental behaviors could foster or hinder children’s development of effortful and reactive control, which then, biases children toward particular types or patterns of empathy-related responding. In contrast, there was limited evidence supporting self-regulation as a moderating mechanism in the pathways from parental characteristics to child reactions. Finally, there was no evidence to support that emotion knowledge moderated the pathways from child self-regulation to child reactions. However, there were interesting relations between emotion knowledge and parenting measures that differed by sex. For boys, parental socialization might be especially important in teaching the child about the meanings of emotional experience and emotional expressions. For girls, parental socialization was less directly associated with emotion knowledge. Rather, empathic understanding predicted scores on emotion knowledge one year later. Particularly for girls, data suggest that early empathic understanding might lay the foundation for later emotion knowledge because both involve empathic (i.e., socio-emotional) and/or socio-cognitive capacities and skills.
... Various authors have conceived empathy differently. It is seen to be a dispositional trait or personality attribute by some (Martin & Clark, 1982), a situation-specific cognitive-affective state, (Duan & Hill, 1996), a facilitative communication skill (Carkhuff, 1969) and an interpersonal and experiential process (Barrett-Lennard, 1981) by others. Judicious use of empathy is mutually beneficial to both client and practitioner, quintessential in furthering the helping process and for the provision of compassionate and person-centred services. ...
This study explored the manifestation of reflective ability, emotional intelligence and empathy in 120 women social workers in Tiruchirappalli, India. A cross-sectional quantitative design was used and the Emotional Intelligence Scale, Groningen Reflective Ability Scale and the Empathy Assessment Index were administered to assess the manifestation of these dimensions. Multiple regression analysis was used to identify predictors of empathy.
Findings
Based on mean scores, the majority of respondents were classified as being ‘high’ in terms of emotional intelligence and reflective ability. Respondents of different age groups showed a significant difference in terms of the manifestation of empathy. Age, self-reflection and appraisal and expression of emotions were extracted as significant predictors of empathy.
Application
The article discusses the importance of these professional attributes for effective practice and the role of academic institutions and social work organisations in fostering the development of these dimensions in social work practitioners.
... Empatija najprej vznikne v preprostih afektivnih oblikah, sčasoma pa postaja bolj kompleksna in vsebuje vedno bolj zapletene kognitivne in afektivne vidike. Z empatijo povezane sposobnosti, zlasti sposobnost prepoznavanja čustvenih stanj pri drugih, se pojavijo že zelo zgodaj, vendar to še ni prava empatija [40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49]. Težko je čisto natančno določiti, kdaj lahko začnemo govoriti o pravi empatiji. ...
ABSTRACT
Natural movements in Kosovo are the main source
of population growth, while migratory movements
have a negative trend since Kosovo continuously
has been the migrant territory.
The end of the last century and the beginning of a
new century were followed by significant changes
in terms of natural movement of Kosovo’s
population as a result of socio-economic and
historical circumstances.
As a consequence of unfavorable economic
situation (dismissal of Albanian employees), lack
of perspective, political uncertainty, and because of
other material and psychological factors, the mass
migrations in general, and migration of young
people in particular were caused. This process
began in 1991 and continued until 2003. This
period is considered the second brake of
demographic fertility and natural growth in
Kosovo. A slight increase was evidenced in the
period 2003- 2005, while in the period 2005-2007
there is again a decrease. In this period, the lowest
birth rate (births in 1000 residents) was recorded in
2007.
Live births, as a multidimensional and long-term
phenomenon is determined by a number of
interrelated biological, socio-economic and sociopsychological
factors.
This paper elaborates the Kosovo population
fertility for the period 1988-2007, which based on
the certain aforementioned factors, is considered
the most dynamic period relevant for this research.
Key words: live births, mortality, natural increase,
Kosovo, migrations, population etc.
... Damit ist die Tendenz gemeint, die emotionsgeladenen Bewegungen einer anderen Person, die man beobachtet, im eigenen Bewegungsverhalten in angedeuteter Form nachzuvollziehen, ohne sich in dem Augenblick gewahr zu sein, dass man das tut. Hierzu gehören zum Beispiel bei Säuglingen das Zurücklächeln, wenn man vom Interaktionspartner angelächelt wird (Wörmann, Holodynski, Kärtner & Keller, 2014), das Zusammenzucken als Reaktion auf das Zusammenzucken des Interaktionspartners oder das ansteckende Weinen von Säuglingen, wenn sie andere Säuglinge weinen hören (Martin & Clark, 1982;Sagi & Hoffman, 1976). ...
... Damit ist die Tendenz gemeint, die emotionsgeladenen Bewegungen einer anderen Person, die man beobachtet, im eigenen Bewegungsverhalten in angedeuteter Form nachzuvollziehen, ohne sich in dem Augenblick gewahr zu sein, dass man das tut. Hierzu gehören zum Beispiel bei Säuglingen das Zurücklächeln, wenn man vom Interaktionspartner angelächelt wird (Wörmann, Holodynski, Kärtner & Keller, 2014), das Zusammenzucken als Reaktion auf das Zusammenzucken des Interaktionspartners oder das ansteckende Weinen von Säuglingen, wenn sie andere Säuglinge weinen hören (Martin & Clark, 1982;Sagi & Hoffman, 1976). ...
... Damit ist die Tendenz gemeint, die emotionsgeladenen Bewegungen einer anderen Person, die man beobachtet, im eigenen Bewegungsverhalten in angedeuteter Form nachzuvollziehen, ohne sich in dem Augenblick gewahr zu sein, dass man das tut. Hierzu gehören zum Beispiel bei Säuglingen das Zurücklächeln, wenn man vom Interaktionspartner angelächelt wird (Wörmann, Holodynski, Kärtner & Keller, 2014), das Zusammenzucken als Reaktion auf das Zusammenzucken des Interaktionspartners oder das ansteckende Weinen von Säuglingen, wenn sie andere Säuglinge weinen hören (Martin & Clark, 1982;Sagi & Hoffman, 1976). ...
... Damit ist die Tendenz gemeint, die emotionsgeladenen Bewegungen einer anderen Person, die man beobachtet, im eigenen Bewegungsverhalten in angedeuteter Form nachzuvollziehen, ohne sich in dem Augenblick gewahr zu sein, dass man das tut. Hierzu gehören zum Beispiel bei Säuglingen das Zurücklächeln, wenn man vom Interaktionspartner angelächelt wird (Wörmann, Holodynski, Kärtner & Keller, 2014), das Zusammenzucken als Reaktion auf das Zusammenzucken des Interaktionspartners oder das ansteckende Weinen von Säuglingen, wenn sie andere Säuglinge weinen hören (Martin & Clark, 1982;Sagi & Hoffman, 1976). ...
... Damit ist die Tendenz gemeint, die emotionsgeladenen Bewegungen einer anderen Person, die man beobachtet, im eigenen Bewegungsverhalten in angedeuteter Form nachzuvollziehen, ohne sich in dem Augenblick gewahr zu sein, dass man das tut. Hierzu gehören zum Beispiel bei Säuglingen das Zurücklächeln, wenn man vom Interaktionspartner angelächelt wird (Wörmann, Holodynski, Kärtner & Keller, 2014), das Zusammenzucken als Reaktion auf das Zusammenzucken des Interaktionspartners oder das ansteckende Weinen von Säuglingen, wenn sie andere Säuglinge weinen hören (Martin & Clark, 1982;Sagi & Hoffman, 1976). ...
... Empatija najprej vznikne v preprostih afektivnih oblikah, sčasoma pa postaja bolj kompleksna in vsebuje vedno bolj zapletene kognitivne in afektivne vidike. Z empatijo povezane sposobnosti, zlasti sposobnost prepoznavanja čustvenih stanj pri drugih, se pojavijo že zelo zgodaj, vendar to še ni prava empatija [40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49]. Težko je čisto natančno določiti, kdaj lahko začnemo govoriti o pravi empatiji. ...
Natural movements in Kosovo are the main source of population growth, while migratory movements have a negative trend since Kosovo continuously has been the migrant territory.
The end of the last century and the beginning of a new century were followed by significant changes in terms of natural movement of Kosovo’s population as a result of socio-economic and historical circumstances.
As a consequence of unfavorable economic situation (dismissal of Albanian employees), lack of perspective, political uncertainty, and because of other material and psychological factors, the mass migrations in general, and migration of young people in particular were caused. This process began in 1991 and continued until 2003. This period is considered the second brake of demographic fertility and natural growth in Kosovo. A slight increase was evidenced in the period 2003- 2005, while in the period 2005-2007 there is again a decrease. In this period, the lowest birth rate (births in 1000 residents) was recorded in 2007.
Live births, as a multidimensional and long-term phenomenon is determined by a number of interrelated biological, socio-economic and sociopsychological factors.
This paper elaborates the Kosovo population fertility for the period 1988-2007, which based on the certain aforementioned factors, is considered the most dynamic period relevant for this research.
... Neonates contagiously cry in response to the distress of conspecifics in their proximity (Martin and Clark 1982), a reaction that is heightened in response to another's crying compared to the child's own crying (Dondi et al. 1999). Contagious crying's specificity and characteristics of affect sharing have prompted the hypothesis that it is one of the earliest forms of empathic arousal. ...
... Neonates contagiously cry in response to the distress of conspecifics in their proximity (Martin and Clark 1982), a reaction that is heightened in response to another's crying compared to the child's own crying (Dondi et al. 1999). Contagious crying's specificity and characteristics of affect sharing have prompted the hypothesis that it is one of the earliest forms of empathic arousal. ...
Evolutionarily, empathy is central to making adaptive evaluations in social environments, bonding with others, and caring for them. In humans, empathic arousal and feelings of concern for others provide the building blocks for the development of morality. Empathic concern emerges early in life in preverbal infants and requires only a minimal capacity for mindreading and self-awareness. In this chapter, it is proposed that empathy is a capacity shared by humans and other mammals, which is dependent on neural circuits that have evolved in the context of parental care and living in social groups. Empathy-based behaviors have afforded unique survival and reproductive advantages and have co-opted primitive homeostatic processes involved in reward and pain systems in order to facilitate various social attachment processes. Studies in affective and social neuroscience are discussed to document that the same network of regions that are involved in physical pain is also responsive to the perception of pain in others as well as social pain, such as social exclusion, grief, or extreme sadness. The sharing of vicarious negative arousal provides a strong signal that can promote empathic concern and caring for others. To be motivated to help another, one needs to be affectively and empathically aroused and to anticipate the cessation of the mutually experienced personal distress. Finally, drawing on neuroimaging studies with juvenile and adult psychopaths, it is argued that the lack of sensitivity to others' suffering contributes to a callous disregard for the welfare of others and increases vulnerability to amoral conduct.
... Infants are exposed to their mothers' voices over the course of the pregnancy, and they are able at birth to distinguish slight differences in rhythmicity, intonation, frequency variation, and phonetic components of speech (DeCasper and Fifer, 1980). Auditory Discrimination of "Self" Martin and Clark (1982) demonstrated that in the first day of life the neonate recognizes his or her own vocalizations and discriminates between them and those of other infants. When a calm baby hears a tape recording of his or her own cry, the infant vocalizes less, whereas the infant vocalizes more when he or she hears the cry of another infant; when a crying baby hears his or her own cry the baby cries less, whereas the baby cries more when he or she hears the cry of another infant. ...
Using research on the purely social face-to-face exchange, we examine patterns of mother-infant interaction and their relevance for the presymbolic origins of self and object representations, focusing on the representation of inter-relatedness between self and object. Based on a dyadic systems view in which the system is defined by both self- and interactive-regulation processes, we argue that characteristic patterns of self and interactive regulation form early interaction structures, which provide an important basis for emerging self and object representations. What will be represented, presymbolically, is the dynamic interactive process itself, the interplay, as each partner influences the other from moment to moment. This is a dynamic, process view of "interactive" or "dyadic" representations. The argument that early interaction structures organize experience is based on a transformational model in which there are continuous transformations and restructurings, where development is in a constant state of active reorganization. To define the capacities on which a presymbolic representational capacity is based, we review the last decade's research on infant perception and memory, which has radically changed our concepts of representation. The interaction structures we describe illustrate the salience of arousal, affect, space, and time in the early organization of experience: (1) state transforming, the expectation that an arousal state can be transformed through the contribution of the partner; (2) facial mirroring, the expectation of matching and being matched in the direction of affective change; (3) disruption and repair, the expectation of degree of ease and rapidity of interactive repair following facial-visual mismatches; (4) "chase and dodge," the expectation of the misregulation and derailment of spatial-orientation patterns, without repair; and (5) interpersonal timing, the expectation of degree of vocal rhythm matching.
... Neonates contagiously cry in response to the distress of conspecifics in their proximity (Martin and Clark 1982), a reaction that is heightened in response to another's crying compared to the child's own crying (Dondi et al. 1999). Contagious crying's specificity and characteristics of affect sharing have prompted the hypothesis that it is one of the earliest forms of empathic arousal. ...
... " Studies of human empathy suggest that the capacity to be affected by distress in others is present from the earliest moments of life. Neonates exposed to the crying of other newborns evince a crying response that is not shown to their own cries or the cries of nonhuman primates (Martin and Clark 1982 ). This early form of emotional contagion is thought to be the precursor to later, more sophisticated types of empathic response (Hoffman 2001 ). ...
First-person pain (the subjective sensory and affective experiences that we associate with tissue damage) motivates changes in the sufferer’s behavior that communicate the experience to others. The ability to infer features of another person’s pain by observing a sufferer’s behavior can be characterized as third-person pain. This chapter reviews research into the nature and determinants of third-person pain, focusing primarily on studies of the interpretation of facial expressions. Existing communication frameworks that attempt to organize thinking in this area are reviewed. Emerging conceptions of empathy and its role in third-person pain processes are described, including neuroimaging studies suggesting that first- person and third-person pain share common features of processing. Based on a review of the existing literature, a new organizing framework focused on the link between encoding of a pain signal by the sufferer and its decoding by the observer is developed. Components of this framework include preattentive processing, detection and registration, evaluation, differential responding (including the fact that the behavioral response to a sufferer may not necessarily be prosocial), and effects upon the observer. Finally, clinical implications of work in this field are considered.
... For example, very young infants match the emotions of others by imitating facial expressions (Field, Woodson, Greenberg & Cohen, 1982), crying when peers cry (Hay, Nash, Pedersen, 1981;Martin & Clark, 1982), and depressing their own responding when their mothers act depressed (Cohn & Tronick, 1983). Trevarthen et al. (1999) argue that imitation plays a role in the early dialogue between the infant and his or her caregiver because imitation occurs at a very particular moment in the stream of interaction. ...
... Neonatal imitation and contagious crying decrease by 5 months of age (Martin & Clark, 1982). In 6-month-olds the regulation of emotional resonance is still weak and susceptible to an increased intensity of others' distress, so that a repeated witnessing of others' cry causes an infant to cry as well (Hay, Nash, & Pedersen, 1981). ...
Chimpanzees are arguably capable of empathizing with others' emotional states. Understanding emotional states is closely associated with understanding non-emotional mental states, thus, with Theory of Mind. Chimpanzees are probably able to represent some, but not all of the mental states grasped by adult humans. However, whether and how they understand another's emotional states is unknown, since the level of cognitive and emotional processing in chimpanzee empathy has not been addressed in detail. We propose a model for chimpanzee empathy, using the development of empathy in humans as a comparative viewpoint. Human empathy develops gradually with increasing cognitive complexity. In the first developmental stages the following levels can be distinguished: emotional contagion in neonates, transition from egocentric to veridical empathy during the second year of life, and finally cognitive empathy at 3 to 4 years of age. The current evidence suggests that chimpanzees are capable of emotional contagion, may be capable of veridical empathy, but probably do not achieve cognitive empathy. Thus, we propose that chimpanzee empathy operates on a continuum from egocentric, to quasi-egocentric, to veridical empathy. We evaluate evidence for this hypothesis and discuss possible ways to test it.
... A key finding in the present study was the indirect linkage between apology and recipient emotion through the perception of the offender's emotion. From the earliest days of infancy, children's emotions are impacted by the emotions of other people (e.g., Martin & Clark, 1982), and the interacting influences of one mental state on another become more complex over the course of development, as is evident in the present research. In the research reported here, the apologetic child signaled his or her remorse via an explicit, verbal apology. ...
Experimental studies of children's responses to apologies often present participants with hypothetical scenarios. This article reports on an experimental study of children's reactions to experiencing an actual disappointment and subsequent apology. Participants (ages four to seven) were told that another child was supposed to share some attractive stickers with them. In the two primary conditions, the other child kept the stickers for himself or herself. Some participants received an apology from the other child, whereas others did not. Compared with children who did not receive the apology, the apology recipients: (1) reported feeling better; (2) viewed the other child as more remorseful; and (3) rated the other child as nicer. Support was found for a mediation model of apology: the positive effects of the apology on children's emotions were accounted for by the effective signaling of remorse by the wrongdoer.
... In contrast, Belin and colleagues [7] did not find correct emotional classifications of rhesus monkey voices. Martin and Clark [55] played screams of chimpanzees to newborn human infants. Whereas they started to cry when listening to other newborn infant cries they did not cry when listening to chimpanzee infant cries. ...
Voice-induced cross-taxa emotional recognition is the ability to understand the emotional state of another species based on its voice. In the past, induced affective states, experience-dependent higher cognitive processes or cross-taxa universal acoustic coding and processing mechanisms have been discussed to underlie this ability in humans. The present study sets out to distinguish the influence of familiarity and phylogeny on voice-induced cross-taxa emotional perception in humans. For the first time, two perspectives are taken into account: the self- (i.e. emotional valence induced in the listener) versus the others-perspective (i.e. correct recognition of the emotional valence of the recording context). Twenty-eight male participants listened to 192 vocalizations of four different species (human infant, dog, chimpanzee and tree shrew). Stimuli were recorded either in an agonistic (negative emotional valence) or affiliative (positive emotional valence) context. Participants rated the emotional valence of the stimuli adopting self- and others-perspective by using a 5-point version of the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM). Familiarity was assessed based on subjective rating, objective labelling of the respective stimuli and interaction time with the respective species. Participants reliably recognized the emotional valence of human voices, whereas the results for animal voices were mixed. The correct classification of animal voices depended on the listener's familiarity with the species and the call type/recording context, whereas there was less influence of induced emotional states and phylogeny. Our results provide first evidence that explicit voice-induced cross-taxa emotional recognition in humans is shaped more by experience-dependent cognitive mechanisms than by induced affective states or cross-taxa universal acoustic coding and processing mechanisms.
... Behavioral and physiological measures of empathic responsiveness were obtained at the 36 month assessment during a task modified from Martin and Clark (1982) and used by Gill and Calkins (2003) with preschool-aged children. First, disposable electrodes were triangulated on the child's chest. ...
This study examined the association between prenatal exposure to cocaine and behavioral and fme. Participants were 216 mother-infant dyads (116 cocaine exposed-CE, 100 nonexposed-NCE) recruited at birth. Measures of heart rate (HR) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) were obtained during baseline and during a task designed to elicit empathy (exposure to infant crying). When the effects of prenatal cocaine use were examined in the context of polydrug use, results of model testing indicated that lower gestational age, prenatal exposure to cocaine and postnatal exposure to alcohol were each associated with a reduced suppression of RSA during the empathy task. These findings provide additional support for an association between prenatal cocaine exposure and dysregulation during early childhood during affect-eliciting environmental challenges.
... The ability of infants to respond specifically to emotions has been described in empathetic distress crying (Sagi & Hoffman, 1976;Simner, 1971) and in studies using emotional stimuli (Dimitrovsky, 1964;Walker, 1981). Studies on the development of voice recognition show that infants (De Casper & Fifer, 1980;Martin & Clarke, 1982;Mills & Melhirsh, 1974) and grammar-school children (Mann, Diamond, & Carey, 1979) can easily recognize voices of caretakers and peers. These studies point to another kind of very early competence for comprehension of prosodic information in speech. ...
The abilities of autistic, schizophrenic, and normal‐control children to label four emotional intonations (the emotional task) in speech were tested, along with a linguistic task. All stimuli were pretested on normal adults. Older (≥ 8 years of age) normal children performed as well as adults on both tasks; younger normal children and both younger and older autistic children performed poorly on the emotional task; children (all older) diagnosed as schizophrenic were not significantly impaired in either task. Mental age was not correlated with performance in autistic children. The relevance of these results to other findings regarding emotional and linguistic behaviors in normal and disabled children is considered.
... It may be a competitive strategy-after all screaming infants are likely to be served before quiet ones-or it may be a way of orienting towards common dangers-as in reactive barking in dogs. The former idea is supported by the fact that infants cry more in response to crying in infants their age, than to older infants, even if they are only separated in age by 5 months (Sinner, 1971;Martin and Clark, 1982). In any case, unless we want to think of the animal cases as being early forms of empathic responding, there is little reason to think of reactive crying as an early form of empathic distress. ...
An increasingly popular suggestion is that empathy and/or sympathy plays a foundational role in understanding harm norms and being motivated by them. In this paper, I argue these emotions play a rather more moderate role in harms norms than we are often led to believe. Evidence from people with frontal lobe damage suggests that neither empathy, nor sympathy is necessary for the understanding of such norms. Furthermore, people's understanding of why it is wrong to harm varies and is by no means limited to considerations of welfare arising from the abilities to sympathize and/or empathize. And the sorts of considerations of welfare that are central to sympathy and, to some extent empathy, are often already moralized. As such, these considerations cannot form the non-moral foundation of harm norms. Finally, empathy and sympathy are not the only emotions that motivate harm norms. Indeed, much of the evidence that has been adduced in favor of the motivational force of empathy and sympathy are studies on helping, which is quite a different behavior than aggression inhibition. Understanding and being motivated by harm norms are complex abilities. To understand them better, we need to move beyond the current fixation on empathy and sympathy.
Media emotion regulation has been defined as parents’ use of media to regulate their children's emotions in early childhood. The purpose of this review is to investigate the predictors of media emotion regulation and its consequences on children's socioemotional development. As predictors of media emotion regulation, parental education level, parental media use, and the child’s temperament were examined. It was observed that parents with low levels of education and higher personal media use more frequently offer their children media emotion regulation than other parents. The relationships between children’s temperamental domains of negative affect and extraversion/surgency and media emotion regulation have been shown as positive, while the relationship between effortful control and media emotion regulation has been displayed as negative. As for the consequences of media emotion regulation on children's socioemotional development, children’s problematic media use, emotional knowledge, and empathy were examined. The relationship between media emotion regulation and problematic media use was displayed as positive; children who frequently experienced media emotion regulation had increased problematic media use. Also, it was shown that media emotion regulation has a negative role in children's emotional knowledge. As children's experience with media emotion regulation increased, their emotional knowledge decreased. Lastly, in the relationship between media emotion regulation and empathy, both positive and negative findings were observed and variables that may influence this relationship were discussed. This study contributes significantly to understanding the conditions under which children more frequently experience media emotion regulation and the role of this experience on children's socioemotional developmentAs the consequences of media emotion regulation on children’s socio-emotional development, children's problematic media use, emotional knowledge, and empathy have been explored. There is a positive relationship between media emotion regulation and problematic media use. As media emotion regulation increases, children's emotional knowledge decreases. Finally, in the relationship between media emotion regulation and empathy, both positive and negative outcomes have been found, suggesting that media content and how children perceive media emotion regulation may influence this relationship. This study offers a significant contribution by exploring the conditions under which children more frequently experience media emotion regulation and its role in children's socio-emotional development.
Empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM) are two core components of social understanding. The EmpaToM is a validated social video task that allows for independent manipulation and assessment of the two capacities. First applications revealed that empathy and ToM are dissociable constructs on a neuronal as well as on a behavioral level. As the EmpaToM has been designed for the assessment of social understanding in adults, it has a high degree of complexity and comprises topics that are inadequate for minors. For this reason, we designed a new version of the EmpaToM that is especially suited to measure empathy and ToM in youths. In experiment 1, we successfully validated the EmpaToM-Y on the original EmpaToM in an adult sample (N = 61), revealing a similar pattern of results across tasks and strong correlations of all constructs. As intended, the performance measure for ToM and the control condition of the EmpaToM-Y showed reduced difficulty. In experiment 2, we tested the feasibility of the EmpaToM-Y in a group of teenagers (N = 36). Results indicate a reliable empathy induction and higher demands of ToM questions for adolescents. We provide a promising task for future research targeting inter-individual variability of socio-cognitive and socio-affective capacities as well as their precursors and outcomes in healthy minors and clinical populations.
Examining the ontogeny of conflict-mitigating behaviours in our closest living relatives is an important component of understanding the evolutionary origins of cooperation in our species. In this study, we used 26 years of data to investigate the emergence of third-party affiliation (TPA), defined as affiliative contact given to recipients of aggression by uninvolved bystanders (regardless of initiation), in wild immature eastern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) of Gombe National Park, Tanzania. We also characterized TPA by mothers in the same dataset as an adult benchmark for interpreting immature TPA patterns. In summary, we found that immatures did not express TPA as measured by grooming between the ages of 1.5 and 12.0 years, and that there was limited evidence that immatures expressed TPA via play. We also found that mothers did express TPA to offspring, although mothers did not show TPA towards non-offspring. Cases of TPA by mothers to other adults were too few to analyse separately. These results contrast with findings from captive studies which found that chimpanzees as young as 6 years of age demonstrated TPA. We argue that within-species variation in the expression of TPA, both in immatures and adulthood, provides evidence that the conflict management behaviours of young chimpanzees may be heavily influenced by social, ecological and demographic factors.
At the same time that social justice concerns are on the rise on college campuses, empathy levels among US college students are falling (Konrath et al. 2016). Social injustice resulting from organizational decisions and actions causes profound and unnecessary human suffering, and research to understand antecedents to these decisions and actions lacks attention. Empathy represents a potential tool and critical skill for organizational decision-makers, with empirical evidence linking empathy to moral recognition of ethical situations and greater breadth of understanding of stakeholder impact and improved financial success. This study explores the potential relationship between empathy and social justice, using a multifaceted operationalization of social justice, which includes management actions (corporate social responsibility and socially responsible attitudes) and social sympathies (distributive justice in US society and agreement with the goals of Occupy Wall Street). Results broadly support the positive empathy and social justice relationship and suggest higher education interventions to develop empathy in college business students.
The paper provides a review of studies on factors influencing empathy development in early childhood and on conditions promoting manifestation of empathy in children later in life. The outcomes of several studies shed light on the character of empathic response at early stages of child development, particularly in infancy and toddlerhood. This review covers research on the role of biological factors and mechanisms in empathy development (for instance, features of temperament and neuronal bases), as well as research on the relationship between genetic and environmental factors in the development of empathy in ontogenesis. Another part of the paper describes studies on the role of social conditions in the development of empathy in childhood: it focuses primarily on family relations and, in particular, on the mother/child relationship. The paper concludes with several suggestions concerning further research of the specified problem.
During pregnancy fetuses are responsive to the external environment, specifically to maternal stimulation. During this period, brain circuits develop to prepare neonates to respond appropriately. The detailed behavioral analysis of fetus’ mouth movements in response to mothers’ speech may reveal important aspects of their sensorimotor and affective skills; however, to date, no studies have investigated this response. Given that newborns at birth are capable of responding with matched behaviors to the social signals emitted by the caregiver, we hypothesize that such precocious responses could emerge in the prenatal period by exploiting infants’ sensitivity to their mother’s voice. By means of a two-dimensional (2D) ultrasonography, we assessed whether fetuses at 25 weeks of gestation, showed a congruent mouthmotor response to maternal acoustic stimulation. Mothers were asked to provide different stimuli, each characterized by a different acoustic output (e.g., chewing, yawning, nursery rhymes, etc.) and we recorded the behavioral responses of 29 fetuses. We found that, when mothers sang the syllable LA in a nursery rhyme, fetuses significantly increased mouth openings. Other stimuli provided by the mother did not produce other significant changes in fetus’ behavior. This finding suggests that fetuses are sensitive only to specific maternal vocalizations (LA) and that fetal matched responses are rudimentary signs of early mirroring behaviors that become functional in the postnatal period. In conclusion, fetuses seem to be predisposed to respond selectively to specific maternal stimuli. We propose that such responses may play a role in the development of behavioral and emotional attunement with their mothers long before birth.
Moral judgment constitutes an important aspect of adults' social interactions. How do adults' moral judgments develop? We discuss work from cognitive and social psychology on adults' moral judgment, and we review developmental research to illuminate its origins. Work in these fields shows that adults make nuanced moral judgments based on a number of factors, including harm aversion, and that the origins of such judgments lie early in development. We begin by reviewing evidence showing that distress signals can cue moral judgments but are not necessary for moral judgment to occur. Next, we discuss findings demonstrating that both children and adults distinguish moral violations from violations of social norms, and we highlight the influence of both moral rules and social norms on moral judgment.We also discuss the influence of actors' intentions on moral judgment. Finally, we offer some closing thoughts on potential similarities between moral cognition and reasoning about other ideologies.
Here we review the studies of emotional facial expression discrimination by newborns and infants in the first year of life. These studies show that 1. sensitivity to changes in facial expression and an attraction to smiling faces might exist in newborns, and are present in the first months of life, 2. the ability to discriminate joy from several other expressions appears before 6 months of age, 3. older infants (aged of 6 or 7 months) show an attraction to fearful faces due to attentional effects and 4. those older infants begin to develop the ability to discriminate between several expressions other than joy. We then discuss the sensitivity of the infants to the genuinely emotional content of facial expressions, which is left more or less unresolved by the reviewed studies, and some possible causal explanations for its development.
Power is a necessary dimension of all human enterprises. It can inspire and illuminate, but it can also corrupt, oppress, and destroy. Therefore, taming power has been a central moral and political question for most of human history. Writers, theorists, and researchers have suggested many methods and mechanisms for taming power: through affiliation and love, intellect and reason, responsibility, religion and values, democratic political structures, and separation of powers. Historical examples and social science research suggest that each has some success, but also that each is vulnerable to being hijacked by power itself. I therefore introduce generative historical consciousness (GHC) as a concept and measure that might help to secure the benefits of power while protecting against its outrages and excesses. I conclude by discussing the role that GHC may have played in the peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. (PsycINFO Database Record
(c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
Empathy emerges in children’s overt behavior around the middle of the second year of life. Younger infants, however, exhibit arousal in response to others’ emotional displays, which is considered to be a precursor to fully developed empathy. The goal of the present study was to investigate individual variability in infants’ arousal toward others’ emotional displays, as indexed by 12- and 15-month-old infants’ (n = 49) pupillary changes in response to another infant’s emotions, and to determine whether such variability is linked to parental empathy and prosociality, as indexed via self-report questionnaires. We found that increases in infants’ pupil dilation in response to others’ emotional displays were associated with aspects of parental empathy and prosociality. Specifically, infants who exhibited the greatest arousal in response to others’ emotions had parents who scored highly on empathic perspective taking and self-reported altruism. These relations may have been found because arousal toward others’ emotions shares certain characteristics with empathic and prosocial dispositions. Together, these results demonstrate the presence of early variability in a precursor to mature empathic responding in infancy, which is meaningfully linked to parents’ empathic dispositions and prosocial behaviors.
Despite increasing empirical and theoretical work on empathy, particularly on the content of empathic representations, there is a relative lack of consensus regarding the information processing necessary for empathy to occur. Here we attempt to delineate a mechanistic cognitive model of empathy in order to provide a framework within which neuroimaging work on empathy can be located, and which may be used in order to understand various disorders characterised by atypical levels of empathy. To this end data from individuals with psychopathy, autism, and alexithymia inform the model, and the model is used to provide a unifying framework for any empathy impairments seen in these disorders. The model adopts a developmental framework and tries to address the four difficult questions of empathy: How do we know what another is feeling? What is the role of theory of mind in empathy? How does the state of another cause a corresponding state in the self? How do we represent another's emotion once emotional contagion has taken place?
Evidence suggests that there are differences in the capacity for empathy between males and females. However, how deep do these differences go? Stereotypically, females are portrayed as more nurturing and empathetic, while males are portrayed as less emotional and more cognitive. Some authors suggest that observed gender differences might be largely due to cultural expectations about gender roles. However, empathy has both evolutionary and developmental precursors, and can be studied using implicit measures, aspects that can help elucidate the respective roles of culture and biology. This article reviews evidence from ethology, social psychology, economics, and neuroscience to show that there are fundamental differences in implicit measures of empathy, with parallels in development and evolution. Studies in nonhuman animals and younger human populations (infants/children) offer converging evidence that sex differences in empathy have phylogenetic and ontogenetic roots in biology and are not merely cultural byproducts driven by socialization. We review how these differences may have arisen in response to males' and females' different roles throughout evolution. Examinations of the neurobiological underpinnings of empathy reveal important quantitative gender differences in the basic networks involved in affective and cognitive forms of empathy, as well as a qualitative divergence between the sexes in how emotional information is integrated to support decision making processes. Finally, the study of gender differences in empathy can be improved by designing studies with greater statistical power and considering variables implicit in gender (e.g., sexual preference, prenatal hormone exposure). These improvements may also help uncover the nature of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders in which one sex is more vulnerable to compromised social competence associated with impaired empathy.
Empathic arousal is the first ontogenetic building block of empathy to appear during infancy and early childhood. As development progresses, empathic arousal becomes associated with an increasing ability to differentiate between self and other, which is a critical aspect of mature empathetic ability (Decety and Jackson, 2004). This allows for better regulation of contagious distress and understanding others mental states. In the current study, we recorded electroencephalographic event-related potentials and mu suppression induced by short visual animations that depicted painful situations in 57 typically developing children aged between 3 to 9 years as well as 15 young adults. Results indicate that the difference wave of an early automatic component (N200), indexing empathic arousal, showed an age-related decrease in amplitude. In contrast, the difference wave of late-positive potentials (LPP), associated with cognitive appraisal, showed an age-related gain. Only early LPP was detected in children, whereas both early and late LPP were observed in adults. Furthermore, as compared with adults, children showed stronger mu suppression when viewing both painful and non-painful stimuli. These findings provide neurophysiological support for the development of empathy during childhood, as indicated by a gradual decrease in emotional arousal and an increase in cognitive appraisal with age.
This paper explores some of the areas where neuroscientific and philosophical issues intersect in the study of self-consciousness. Taking as point of departure a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) that appears to block philosophical elucidation of self-consciousness, the paper illustrates how the highly conceptual forms of self-consciousness emerge from a rich foundation of nonconceptual forms of self-awareness. Attention is paid in particular to the primitive forms of nonconceptual self-consciousness manifested in visual perception, somatic proprioception, spatial reasoning and interpersonal psychological interactions. The study of these primitive forms of self-consciousness is an interdisciplinary enterprise and the paper considers a range of points of contact where philosophical work can illuminate work in the cognitive sciences, and vice versa.
It is well established that children recognize themselves in mirrors by the end of infancy, showing awareness of the self as an object in the environment. However, the cognitive impact of objective self-awareness requires further elucidation. This gap in the literature is addressed in a series of 7 experiments exploring the role of self in 3- and 4-year-olds' event memory. A mnemonic bias for self-relevant material has been described in adults. This effect is thought to be based on the organizational properties of a highly elaborated self-concept and so offers a clear route to study the child's developing sense of self. However, very few studies have investigated the ontogeny of this effect. New evidence is provided to suggest that preschool children, like adults, show a mnemonic advantage for material that has been physically linked with the self through performance of a depicted action (Experiment 1). Moreover, 3- and 4-year-olds show a bias for material that has been visually and linguistically processed with the self-image (Experiments 2, 3, and 4) and material that has been socio-cognitively linked to the self in terms of ownership (Experiments 5, 6, and 7). The data imply that both bottom-up (kinesthetic feedback and self-concept) and top-down (attention) aspects of self-reflection may play a supporting role in early event memory, perhaps representing a nascent form of autobiographical processing. Importantly, this research highlights a promising methodology for elucidating the executive role of the self in cognition. Following William James's (1890) influential conception of the self, it seems that in typical development, "I" is primed to remember "me."
Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are a group of pervasive developmental conditions characterized in part by atypical development in social-communicative functions. Novel discoveries regarding the impact of the neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) on social behavior and its association with ASD prevalence and phenotypic presentation have generated a great deal of interest into OT’s possible role in ASD etiology and excitement about its potential as a therapeutic instrument. And yet, many challenges are faced by translational research efforts for OT in ASD. In this manuscript, some of these challenges are addressed, specifically the complexities of OT’s behavioral effects, the yet unknown long-term impact of OT, the undetermined neural mechanism underlying OT’s effects, and the non-linear impacts OT has on brain and behavior. In conclusion, guidelines for future translational research efforts are suggested.
In this article we analyze the strengths and weaknesses of mindreading versus embodied cognition approaches to emotion understanding. In the first part of the article we argue that mindreading explanations of how we understand the emotions of others (TT, ST or hybrid) face a version of the frame problem, i.e. the problem of how to limit the scope of the information that is relevant to mindreading. Also, we show that embodied cognition explanations are able to by-pass this problem because they provide a characterization of social understanding as being essentially situated. However, embodied cognition explanations seem to be limited in scope insofar as they do not target the more sophisticated forms of emotion understanding that have traditionally been the main focus of mindreading explanations. In the second part of the article we discuss Goldie’s account of emotion understanding as a possible way to complement embodied cognition approaches without re-introducing the frame problem. We offer two suggestions that might further the integration of Goldie’s account of emotion understanding within the framework of embodied cognition.
Although developmental psychologists traditionally explore morality from a learning and development perspective, some aspects of the human moral sense may be built-in, having evolved to sustain collective action and cooperation as required for successful group living. In this article, I review a recent body of research with infants and toddlers, demonstrating surprisingly sophisticated and flexible moral behavior and evaluation in a preverbal population whose opportunity for moral learning is limited at best. Although this work itself is in its infancy, it supports theoretical claims that human morality is a core aspect of human nature.
The present study investigated the experience of schadenfreude among children. Participants were 4- to 8-year-old children (n = 100) who were told stories of another child experiencing a misfortune while pursuing a morally positive versus morally negative goal. Schadenfreude, sympathy, and helping behaviour towards the suffering child were assessed. Results showed that beginning at the age of 4, emotional and behavioural reactions towards a misfortune of another child were predicted by the moral valence of the other child's goal. Furthermore, morally negative goals decreased helping behaviour and morally positive goals increased helping behaviour. Multilevel mediation analysis revealed that the relation between goal valence and helping behaviour was mediated by both schadenfreude and sympathy. However, those effects were especially pronounced in older children.
When we exposed the inapplicability of the current definition of pain to neonatal experiences [8], objections to our viewpoint hinged on the absence of consciousness in such nonlinguistic beings [37]. The evidence reviewed in this focus article demonstrates the occurrence and manifestations of consciousness during evolution and human development. Consciousness is described in the full-term newborn, the premature neonate, and the developing human fetus. The clinical implications of ignoring its existence excludes these patients from the benefit of pain relief, promotes more lenient criteria for their participation as research subjects, and produces marked changes in professional attitudes and analgesic practices. We conclude that the definition of pain imposes more stringent standards for acknowledging the presence of pain in nonlinguistic beings and should be changed to include sources of evidence other than verbal self-report.
Emotional changes are common in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Intrinsic connectivity imaging studies suggest that default mode network degradation in AD is accompanied by the release of an emotion-relevant salience network. We investigated whether emotional contagion, an evolutionarily conserved affect-sharing mechanism, is higher in MCI and AD secondary to biological alterations in neural networks that support emotion. We measured emotional contagion in 237 participants (111 healthy controls, 62 patients with MCI, and 64 patients with AD) with the Interpersonal Reactivity Index Personal Distress subscale. Depressive symptoms were evaluated with the Geriatric Depression Scale. Participants underwent structural MRI, and voxel-based morphometry was used to relate whole-brain maps to emotional contagion. Analyses of covariance found significantly higher emotional contagion at each stage of disease progression [controls < MCI (P < 0.01) and MCI < AD (P < 0.001)]. Depressive symptoms were also higher in patients compared with controls [controls < MCI (P < 0.01) and controls < AD (P < 0.0001)]. Higher emotional contagion (but not depressive symptoms) was associated with smaller volume in right inferior, middle, and superior temporal gyri (PFWE < 0.05); right temporal pole, anterior hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus; and left middle temporal gyrus (all P < 0.001, uncorrected). These findings suggest that in MCI and AD, neurodegeneration of temporal lobe structures important for affective signal detection and emotion inhibition are associated with up-regulation of emotion-generating mechanisms. Emotional contagion, a quantifiable index of empathic reactivity that is present in other species, may be a useful tool with which to study emotional alterations in animal models of AD.
Children with phonological impairment (PI) often have difficulties perceiving insufficiencies in their own speech. The use of recordings has been suggested as a way of directing the child's attention toward his/her own speech, despite a lack of evidence that children actually recognize their recorded voice as their own. We present two studies of children's self-voice identification, one exploring developmental aspects, and one exploring potential effects of having a PI. The results indicate that children from 4 to 8 years recognize their recorded voice well (around 80% accuracy), regardless of whether they have a PI or not. A subtle change in this ability from 4 to 8 years is observed that could be linked to a development in short-term memory. Clinically, one can indeed expect an advantage of using recordings in therapy; this could constitute an intermediate step toward the more challenging task of online self-monitoring.
Altruistic behavior and motivation has traditionally been regarded as a defense mechanism defined by the vicissitudes of instinctual gratification. In this article, we suggest that there exists a substantial body of evidence from the fields of ethology, infant research, and experimental psychology to support the existence of an independently motivated altruism that is nondefensive in nature. We attempt to show how the view of altruism as a universal motivational system stems from the recent developments in evolutionary theory and contributes to our understanding of intrapsychic factors influencing human behavior in general and the process of psychotherapy in particular. It is not our goal to prove the existence of "pure altruism" that can never be derived from selfish motives. Rather, our thesis is that self-oriented and altruistic motivations are equal and essential partners in human evolution and development. It is the optimal balance of these two forces that is necessary for evolutionary advancement and for psychological health.
Most accounts of the origins of the self-concept in humans rely on the mirror self-recognition (rouge removal) task whereby the infant is credited with self-awareness at about 15 months, once it is able to use the mirror reflection to locate a dab of rouge on the nose. But mirror self- recognition may require relatively advanced cognitive abilities and may reveal relatively little about the ontogenetic origins of self-knowledge. The aim of this article is to consider the antecedents of self-knowledge in processes of sensory perception during infancy. J. J. Gibson' s ecological approach to sensory perception asserts that there is information for the distinction between self and nonself inherent in perception. Evidence from human infants who are too young to recognize themselves in mirrors is reviewed for a sensory perceptual basis for the existential self (the I) and for the categorical self (the me) in William James' s terminology. Studies of the visual proprioceptive control of posture in babies may be interpreted to support an inherent distinction between self and nonself in infantperception, rather than the traditional account of an "adualistic confusion." Similarly, various aspects of bodily self-awareness manifested even by fetuses demonstrate some basis for a categorical self as an original aspect of experience. Self-specification in perception is also indicated in recent research on imitation in very young infants, a possible mechanism for the essentially social component of self-concept development. Although a case for early self-specification in perception can readily be made, it is much more difficult to explain how self-perception gives rise to self-conception. One possibility briefly discussed is that a process of representation and re-representation of information originally obtained through interaction with physical and social objects gives rise to reflective self- awareness and the particularly autobiographical knowledge of self which we take to be species- typical of humans.
This study examined a largely overlooked, yet potentially important, association between empathy and distress in cry responding. The cry stimulus included a 1-min-long video clip of a 4-week-old, crying, male infant. Participants reported their dispositional empathy and distress, perceived aversiveness of the cry stimulus, response emotions, and intention to intervene with the crying infant. Empathy and distress covaried positively both in disposition and in cry responding. Response empathy and distress were related to their corresponding dispositional emotions, but response empathy was also related to dispositional distress. Perceived aversiveness interacted with response distress in predicting response empathy. Both response empathy and distress appeared to be important determinants of intention to intervene. Overall, empathy and distress in response to infant crying appeared more closely related than previously thought. Implications concerning the regulation of emotions in cry responding are discussed.
Theories, data, methodological and conceptual problems concerning the study of gender differences in the development of defenses, emotional expression, recognition, and experiences are reviewed Data indicate gender differences in several areas of emotional functioning, including nonverbal sensitivity, expressiveness, self-reports of anger, fear, and sadness, the quality of defenses, and cognitive correlates of recognition abilities Studies suggest that with development, boys increasingly inhibit the expression and attribution of most emotions, whereas girls increasingly inhibit the expression and recognition of socially unacceptable emotions, e g, anger These differences may be a function of different socialization processes for males and females, which may be adaptations to innate gender differences in temperament, or adaptations to existing sociocultural pressures
The present paper argues that emotions motivate and regulate adaptive behaviors, and that researchers must explore gender differences in emotional development as a function of different familial, sociocultural, and interpersonal roles to which males and females must adapt
Investigated the effect of several variables on helping behavior, using subway express trains as a field laboratory. 4 teams of undergraduates, each made up of a victim, model, and 2 Os, staged standard collapses in which type of victim (drunk or ill), race of victim (black or white), and presence or absence of a model were varied. It was found that: (a) an apparently ill person is more likely to receive aid than one who appears drunk; (b) race of victim has little effect on race of helper except when the victim is drunk; (c) the longer the emergency continues without help being offered, the more likely it is that someone will leave the area of the emergency; and (d) the expected "diffusion of responsibility effect" found by J. Darley and B. Latane (see 43:3) did not occur. Implications of this difference between laboratory and field results are discussed, and a brief model for the prediction of behavior in emergency situations is presented.
When a UCS, reinforcer, or innate releaser is repeatedly presented to human or animal Ss, 3 major affective phenomena are often observed: (1) affective or hedonic contrast; (2) frequent repetition giving rise to affective or hedonic habituation (tolerance); and (3) after frequent repetition of these stimuli, a withdrawal or abstinence syndrome emerging directly from stimulus termination. These affective dynamics generate new motives, new opportunities for reinforcing and energizing operant behaviors, based on the hedonic attributes of withdrawal or abstinence syndromes. The present article describes the opponent-process theory that attempts to account for such diverse acquired motives as drug addiction, love, affection and social attachment, cravings for sensory and aesthetic experiences, and a variety of self-administered, aversive stimuli. The empirical laws governing the establishment of these new motives are described. Crucial variables include the quality, intensity, and duration of each stimulus presentation and the time intervals between presentations (interreinforcement intervals). The theory also gives a plausible account of the development of addictive behaviors, whether initiated by pleasurable or by aversive events. (53 ref)
Tested the I. Piliavin, J. Rodin, and J. A. Piliavin (see record
1970-03549-001) theory of bystander intervention using 6 teams of 4 undergraduates each (1 victim, 1 programmed bystander, and 2 Os). A victim with a cane collapsed in a moving subway car and either "bled" from the mouth or did not. As predicted, help was significantly slower and less frequent to the bloody victim. Several other findings from a previous study were replicated, and further information was obtained on the diffusion of responsibility effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Investigated the effects of ambiguity of an emergency situation on helping behavior. In Exp. I, 70 male undergraduates waiting either alone, with a stranger, or with a friend heard a maintenance man fall and cry out in agony. 1/2 of the 2-person groups were naive; the other 1/2 included a confederate who was instructed to react as passively as possible. In contrast to the finding of B. Latene and J. Rodin's study, all Ss intervened. In Exp. II, 150 Ss either alone, with 1 other, or with 4 others were exposed to either a nonambiguous or an ambiguous emergency situation. At least 1 S in all of the nonambiguous conditions responded to the needs of the victim, whereas approximately 30% of the Ss in the ambiguous condition included a helper. Ss in the latter 2- and 5-person group were less likely to help and intervened slower than was expected on the basis of the alone Ss' performances. Results are attributed to the degree of ambiguity and seriousness of consequences employed in the emergency situation. (20 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Conducted 4 experiments with a total of 97 male and 98 female newborn infants to determine whether reflexive crying occurs in newborns and to define the parameters that control this behavior. It was found that (a) vocal properties of the newborn's cry were effective in promoting crying in other newborns, and (b) that feedback from the infant's own cry may be instrumental in the development of this behavior. Data were obtained questioning the likelihood of a direct relationship between reflexive crying and the later development of preverbal vocal behavior. Ancillary results pertaining to a seasonal trend, sex differences, and the role of arousal in supporting reflexive crying are provided. (39 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Preschool children were given training in helping behavior in 2 experiments (n = 104 and 23, respectively). They were assigned to a control group or to play groups in which an adult caretaker, over a period of several weeks, provided either high-nurturant or low-nurturant adult modeled sympathetic helping. For a part of the sample, a symbolic medium was used for training; for the rest, symbolic and behavioral situations of distress were used. Training effects were measured 2 days later and 2 wk. later. Ss' recall of the experiment and their concept of helping were measured 6 mo. later. Ss in the main study were upper middle class in origin. Part of the study was repeated with children from low economic background. Symbolic altruism was significantly increased in all experimental groups and was unaffected by the nurturance variations in the adult. Altruistic behavior measured in nonpressured and realistic encounters with distress was increased by the model's nurturance. Ss with nurturant caretakers who had modeled helping in both symbolic and live distress gave more help, verbalized more sympathy, and were more consistent in their altruism. (26 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The comparison of human and chimpanzee macromolecules leads to several inferences: 1) Amino acid sequencing, immunological, and electrophoretic methods of protein comparison yield concordant estimates of genetic resemblance. These approaches all indicate that the average human polypeptide is more than 99 percent identical to its chimpanzee counterpart. 2) Nonrepeated DNA sequences differ more than amino acid sequences. A large proportion of the nucleotide differences between the two species may be ascribed to redundancies in the genetic code or to differences in non-transcribed regions. 3) The genetic distance between humans and chimpanzees, based on electrophoretic comparison of proteins encoded by 44 loci is very small, corresponding to the genetic distance between sibling species of fruit flies or mammals. Results obtained with other biochemical methods are consistent with this conclusion. However, the substantial anatomical and behavioral differences between humans and chimpanzees have led to their classification in separate families. This indicates that macromolecules and anatomical or behavioral features of organisms can evolve at independent rates. 4) A relatively small number of genetic changes in systems controlling the expression of genes may account for the major organismal differences between humans and chimpanzees. Some of these changes may result from the rearrangement of genes on chromosomes rather than from point mutations (53).
Chicks and ducklings can discriminate the maternal call of their species in the absence of specific previous experience with the maternal call. Previous auditory stimulation resulting from exposure of the neonate to its own brooding-like call contributes to the responsiveness of chicks and ducklings to the maternal call of their species. However, on the basis of the present experiments, the contribution of the perinatal call to the neonate's attraction to the maternal call of its species is not made via a process akin to stimulus generalization.The auditory perceptual mechanism for species identification is a highly complete one in the sense of directing the neonate's responsiveness to the vocalization of a sibling of its own species in the case where the maternal call of its species is not available.Though previous auditory stimulation from the neonate's own call enhances the functioning of the auditory perceptual mechanism for species identification in ducklings, it is not yet known whether exposure to the perinatal brooding-like call is essential to the establishment (acquisition) of the auditory perceptual mechanism.