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Parenting Journal · Volume 2 · Issue 1 · Licensed source edition

Parents’ empathic perspective taking and altruistic behavior predicts infants’ arousal to others’ emotions

Originally published 2015-04-02 · Frontiers in Psychology
Frontiers Media SA · DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00360 ↗

KindnessStructured task or observational assessmentCC BY 4.0
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Editorial reading guide · Kindness

What do I notice when my infant hears another baby becoming upset?

This article addresses infant attention to another infant’s emotions alongside parents’ altruistic behavior.

Who was studied?

49 infants taking part in a pupil-response study and their parents

Age / stage: 12 and 15 months

Read with three questions

  1. How did the authors investigate infant attention to another infant’s emotions alongside parents’ altruistic behavior?
  2. Which actions were observed directly, and how closely does the task resemble family life?
  3. Does a change in an infant’s pupil size distinguish empathy from general emotional arousal?

Keep the limits in view

Pupil change is a measure of arousal. It does not independently show that an infant understood the other infant’s emotional state.

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Original authorship, publication date, journal and DOI are preserved. This issue’s TRICK placement and reading questions are editorial additions, not claims made by the original authors.

Michaela B. Upshaw; Cheryl R. Kaiser; Jessica A. Sommerville (2015). Parents’ empathic perspective taking and altruistic behavior predicts infants’ arousal to others’ emotions Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00360

Permissions checked against the saved article notice; repository publication notices screened 2026-11-04. This is not a new peer-review decision. The source authors and publishers are not represented as endorsing this issue.