Cognitive and Emotional Control and Perspective Taking and Their Relations to Empathy in 5-Year-Old Children

The experience of empathy has been described as involving both emotional and cognitive components. The primary hypothesis tested in this study is that cognition and emotion are integrated within 2 distinct types of abilities—control and perspective taking—and that interactions between emotional and cognitive control and between affective and cognitive perspective taking would be related to children's empathic responding. We also hypothesized that boys' control and perspective-taking skills would be more strongly related to empathy than would those of girls. Fifty-seven 5-year-olds completed tasks measuring cognitive control, cognitive and affective perspective taking, and empathy, and their mothers completed a measure of children's emotional control. Results indicated that cognitive perspective taking moderated the relation between affective perspective taking and empathy. In addition, the relation between cognitive inhibitory control and empathy was moderated by gender; boys' control was positively related to empathy, but girls' control was marginally negatively related to empathy.