The developmental trajectories of affective empathy, cognitive, empathy, and prosocial behaviors among Filipino preschool children / Apryl Mae C. Parcon

Dissertation (Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology) -- University of the Philippines Diliman, January 2019

This research aimed to investigate possible developmental trajectories of affective
empathy, cognitive empathy, and prosocial behaviors among Filipino preschool children. In
Study 1, the main factors, which were posited to significantly predict cognitive and affective
empathy were: age, gender, and theory-of-mind. For the prosocial behaviors, the same
variables were examined (i.e., age, gender, and theory-of-mind), with the addition of affective
empathy and cognitive empathy. Moderation and mediation effects were also examined. A total
of 223 preschool children, with ages ranging from 3 to 6.6 years old (M=4.34, SD=.63)
participated in Study 1. Each child individually went through different tasks with the researcher.
Theory-of-mind was measured through false-belief task. As for the measure of empathy, each
child watched three short clips with different emotions (i.e., happy, sad, or angry emotion). To
measure affective empathy, their facial expressions were recorded as they watched the clip,
and then scored according to the degree of match between the emotion of the characters in the
clip and the children's facial expressions. To measure cognitive empathy, children were
interviewed regarding the clip that they watched, and their responses were scored according to
their understanding of the emotions of the characters in the clips. Prosocial behaviors were
measured in two ways: the latency by which the child would help in picking up the crayons that
fell on the floor and the degree to which the child would comfort the researcher who hurt herself
with the clipboard. Regression analysis showed that only age and theory-of-mind predicted
cognitive empathy, while none of the aforementioned factors predicted affective empathy. As for
prosocial behaviors, age and gender differences were observed. Also, affective empathy and
cognitive empathy significantly predicted prosocial behaviors. While there was no significant
moderation effect among factors, there was a significant mediation effect, particularly with
cognitive empathy significantly mediating the relation between theory-of-mind and prosocial behaviors.

Study 2 looked into other factors that could predict affective empathy. The same variables
were posited, except that theory-of-mind was replaced with attachment. A total of 87 children
(forming a subset of the 223 children in Study 1), together with their respective mothers
participated. The recorded affective empathy, cognitive empathy and prosocial scores of the
children were again used as source of data. The mothers, on the other hand, completed the
Attachment Q-sort (ASQ) version 3.0 of Walters and Deane (1995), where they had to sort
ninety (90) behavioral descriptions into nine piles from least descriptive to most descriptive.
Results showed that lower dependency attachment predicted affective empathy, but not
cognitive empathy. Age differences were again observed in cognitive empathy, but not in
affective empathy. Also, both affective empathy and cognitive empathy significantly predicted
prosocial behaviors. In addition, secure attachment also directly predicted prosocial behaviors.
As for moderation effects, cognitive empathy moderated the effects of secure attachment on
prosocial behaviors. As for mediation effects, affective empathy significantly mediated the
relation of dependency attachment and prosocial behaviors.

Differences in development between affective empathy and cognitive empathy can be

inferred from the study's finding that each had different predictors, i.e. while age and theory-of-
mind predicted cognitive empathy, lower dependency attachment predicted affective empathy.

The mediation analysis also clarified the linkage between empathy and prosocial behaviors.
With this, a dual-process system could be inferred where on the one hand, theory-of-mind
directly influenced cognitive empathy, which then influenced the display of prosocial behaviors
while on the other hand, lower dependency attachment influenced affective empathy, which
then influenced the display of prosocial behaviors.