Parenting Journal · Volume 1 · Issue 1 · Licensed source edition
Empathy in Toddlers: The Role of Emotion Regulation, Language Ability, and Maternal Emotion Socialization Style
Originally published 2020-10-20 · Frontiers in Psychology
Frontiers Media SA · DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586862 ↗
Editorial reading guide · Kindness
How are emotion coaching, language and emotion regulation associated with toddler empathy?
Examines empathy alongside children’s language, emotion regulation and mothers’ emotion-coaching style. It helps readers distinguish several capacities that may accompany early kindness rather than assuming one parental technique explains them all.
Who was studied?
Three hundred twenty toddlers and their mothers, recruited through Italian infant–toddler centers.
Age / stage: Toddlers; mean age 28.8 months
Read with three questions
- Which associations remained after considering age and language ability?
- How did emotion-coaching and dismissing styles differ?
- Did child emotion regulation moderate the parenting–empathy association?
Keep the limits in view
Mothers reported both child abilities and their own socialization style. Cross-sectional data and a middle-socioeconomic-status sample do not establish direction of effects or broad generalizability.
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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.
Veronica Ornaghi; Elisabetta Conte; Ilaria Grazzani (2020). Empathy in Toddlers: The Role of Emotion Regulation, Language Ability, and Maternal Emotion Socialization Style Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586862
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