Sharing the Joy: How Children’s Facial Expressions Relate to Empathy

What is it about?

Empathy is often studied by looking at how children respond when someone else is upset or in distress. This study instead focused on positive empathy—sharing in another person’s positive emotions, such as happiness or joy. The researchers examined whether children’s emotional responses to another child’s happiness were related to their general level of empathy. Eighty-one children between 6 and 12 years old watched a short video of infants laughing. Their facial expressions were recorded and analyzed using automated facial-expression software, and the children also reported how the video made them feel. Parents completed a questionnaire measuring their child’s general, or “trait,” empathy. Children showed more positive facial expressions and reported feeling happier while watching the laughing infants than they did at baseline. More importantly, children who showed more positive facial expressions and fewer negative facial expressions in response to the video were rated by their parents as having higher levels of trait empathy. These relationships remained even after accounting for children’s age, gender, and facial expressions at baseline. In contrast, children’s own reports of how they felt while watching the video were not significantly related to their trait empathy.

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Photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash

Photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Most research on empathy has focused on how children respond to other people’s distress or other negative emotions. However, sharing another person’s happiness is also an important part of empathy and social development. This study broadens our understanding of empathy by showing that children’s spontaneous facial responses to another person’s joy are related to their more general, parent-reported levels of empathy. The findings also highlight the importance of using different ways to measure children’s emotional responses. Although children’s self-reported feelings were not related to their trait empathy, their facial expressions were. This suggests that objective measures of children’s spontaneous emotional responses may capture information that is not reflected in self-reports. More broadly, the findings emphasize that understanding empathy requires looking not only at how children respond to others’ distress, but also at how they share in others’ happiness and joy.