Do you have a child between 3 and 5 years old?

The Empathy Project

Your child’s best friend has just broken their favourite teddy and starts crying. Your child stares at their friend with a very sad face. Your little one is likely experiencing “empathy” — understanding and sharing someone else’s emotional state. While we know that this skill is fundamental for social interactions, how and when it develops is still unclear. By understanding this better and what factors promote the development of empathy, we can help foster these skills in children who have difficulties in social interactions. 

Toddlerhood is a crucial age in which to study empathy. From age two, toddlers are able to understand whether emotions come from themselves or from others. By age three, most toddlers have daily interactions with other peers in nursery or in the playground.  

To launch our study into empathy, our research team visited a nursery class to explore how toddlers interact with each other in real life, and how they react when a classmate shows some distress. We found that quite often, toddlers would stare at a classmate when they were crying. We believe this could reflect personal distress but could also be an attempt to understand why the other child cries. To help disentangle what is happening inside a toddlers’ brain in these scenarios, the second stage of our project will be carried out in Birkbeck's ToddlerLab.