Journal
DEVELOPMENTAL COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 10, Issue -, Pages 160-169Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.dcn.2014.08.012
Keywords
Childhood; Development; Empathy; EEG; ERP; Mu suppression
Categories
Funding
- Ministry of Science and Technology [MOST 103-2401-H-010-003-MY3]
- National Yang-Ming University Hospital [RD2014-003]
- Health Department of Taipei City Government [10301-62-009]
- Ministry of Education (Aim for the Top University Plan) [103AC-B4]
- John Templeton Foundation (The Science of Philanthropy Initiative)
- John Templeton Foundation (Wisdom Research at the University of Chicago)
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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 and 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 agerelated 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. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://ceativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
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