Markus R. Tünte, Celine Dorczok, Stefanie Höhl Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Austria
Already in the first two years of life infants respond to another person’s pain with empathic concern. In the present study, we replicated an empathic concern paradigm in which mothers displayed simulations of distress by pretending to hurt either knee or finger while interacting with their child. Infant’s reaction was video coded for self-distress, concerned affect, prosocial-, and inquiry behavior. We extended video coding of the distress simulation by rating length and intensity of the mother’s behavior, and the extent to which the infant had witnessed the event. Electrocardiogram was recorded from mother and infants during distress-episodes and neutral play-phase to compute respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and physiological synchrony, using a sliding window method. Regarding behavioral data, our preregistered analysis of the whole sample (N = 90) indicated that infants displayed stronger behaviors on all four scales during the distress-episodes, compared to a neutral play-phase (all p < .001). Further, a longer and more intense maternal distress simulation was related to increased empathic concern (p < .001) and inquiry behavior (p = .02). However, whether the infant witnessed the event did not impact behavior. Regarding RSA, our preliminary analysis (N = 12) indicates no increased RSA and RSA-synchrony for distress-episodes, compared to neutral-episodes. However, analysis of the whole dataset is needed to confirm these preliminary results. In summary, our results replicate previous findings, showing that empathic concern can be measured in 9-month-old infants by video coding reactions to maternal distress simulations and highlight the importance of incorporating the mothers’ reaction.
