Bridget M. Gaertner

Assessment of preschoolers’ positive empathy: concurrent and longitudinal relations with positive emotion, social competence, and sympathy

The purpose of this study was to examine a new measure of childrens dispositional positive empathy (i.e., reactions to others’ positive emotions) and its concurrent and longitudinal relations with positive emotion, social competence, and empathy/sympathy with negative emotions. At Time 1, 192 3.5-year-olds (88 girls) participated; at Time 2, 1 year later, 168 4.5-year-olds (79 girls) participated. Childrens positive empathy was reported by mothers and observed in the laboratory at Time 2. Additionally, mothers, fathers, and non-parental caregivers completed questionnaires at Time 1 and Time 2 regarding childrens positive emotion, empathy/sympathy, and social competence. Childrens positive emotion was observed at both assessments. There was evidence of reliability of the new reported measure of positive empathy. Additionally, there were numerous positive relations between positive empathy and social competence and between positive empathy and empathy/sympathy with negative emotions. This study provides unique insight into childrens positive empathy and relations to socio-emotional functioning.

'It's not that we hate you': understanding children's gender attitudes and expectancies about peer relationships.

Widespread gender segregation, evident throughout elementary school, seems to imply that girls and boys have negative feelings and thoughts about one another, and classic theories of inter-group processes support this idea. However, research has generally overlooked childrens feelings and perceptions about gender-related interpersonal interactions. This paper investigates the nature of childrens attitudes about same- and other-gender peers, and explores how those attitudes relate to the expectancies and beliefs children hold about same- and other-gender peer interactions. Children (N= 98 fifth graders) completed questionnaires assessing their global liking of own- and other-gender peers (Yee & Brown, 1994), positive and negative attitudes about own- and other-gender peers, and outcome expectancies related to interacting with own- and other-gender peers. Results indicated that rather than being characterized by out-group negativity, childrens inter-group gender attitudes are best characterized by an in-group positivity bias. Childrens positive and negative affective attitudes were also significantly associated with outcome expectancies. In contrast, global liking of own- and other-gender peers was less predictive of outcome expectancies. Thus, the greater specificity of the affective attitude measures appeared to be a more predictive and potentially fruitful gauge of childrens feelings about own- and other-gender peers. Results are discussed in terms of the need for finer grained and more extensive studies of childrens gender-related feelings and cognitions about own- and other-gender peers.