The relations of children's dispositional empathy-related responding to their emotionality, regulation, and social functioning.

TLDR

The study examined how kindergartners’ and 2nd graders’ dispositional sympathy relates to individual differences in emotionality, regulation, and social functioning. Sympathy was assessed through teacher and self reports, while parents and teachers reported on emotionality, regulation, and social functioning at the same time and two years earlier; social functioning was also measured via peer evaluations and puppet play, and negative arousability was evaluated physiologically. Sympathy was associated with higher regulation, teacher‑reported positive emotionality, and greater emotional intensity; for boys, it linked to better social functioning and lower negative emotionality, including reduced physiological reactivity, whereas vagal tone positively related to boys’ self‑reported sympathy but negatively for girls.

Abstract

The relations of kindergartners' to 2nd graders' dispositional sympathy to individual differences in emotionality, regulation, and social functioning were examined. Sympathy was assessed with teacher- and self-reports ; contemporaneously and 2 years earlier, parents and teachers reported on children's emotionality, regulation, and social functioning. Social functioning also was assessed with peer evaluations and children's enacted puppet behavior, and negative arousability-personal distress was assessed with physiological responses. In general, sympathy was associated with relatively high levels of regulation, teacher-reported positive emotionality and general emotional intensity, and especially for boys, high social functioning and low levels of negative emotionality, including physiological reactivity to a distress stimulus. Vagal tone was positively related to boys' self-reported sympathy, whereas the pattern was reversed for girls.