Running Head: LITERATURE REVIEW: EMOTION RECOGNITION AND EMPATHY
Literature Review: Relations between Caregivers’ and Children’s Empathy, Emotion
Recognition, and Anger Bias
July 17, 2014
Jordan Barnada
Stevie N. Grassetti, M.A.
Julie A. Hubbard, Ph.D.
University of Delaware
Psychology Department
EMOTION RECOGNITION AND EMPATHY: LITERATURE REVIEW
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Literature Review: Relations between Caregivers’ and Children’s Empathy, Emotion
Recognition, and Anger Bias
Empathy is defined as “…the capacity to experience the emotions of another and/or…the
capacity to comprehend the emotions of another” (Jolliffe & Farrington, 2006, p. 589). The
ability to recognize emotions in others may be an important component of empathy. To date,
though, little is known about how children develop skills needed for emotion recognition and
empathy or whether emotion recognition skills and empathy are both conceptually and
empirically related constructs. The overarching aim of the current study was to take a first step
toward addressing these gaps by examining concurrent measures of empathy and emotion
recognition in caregivers and their children. More specifically, the first goal was to examine
relations between caregivers’ and children’s emotion recognition and empathic abilities to
explore the possibility that these skills are intergenerationally transmitted. The second goal was
to investigate whether caregivers and children show similar biases when they make emotion
recognition errors, specifically if they are similar in their tendency to be biased toward
perceiving anger and/or other hostile emotions. Finally, the third goal was to explore whether
emotion recognition skills, emotion recognition bias, and empathy for others are empirically
related in both caregivers and children.
Research on the association between caregivers’ and children’s emotion recognition skills
is limited and equivocal. Many previous studies have found that children fare better emotionally
and socially when their caregivers show clear emotional expression and when their caregivers
can recognize their emotions (Dunsmore, Her, Halberstadt, & Perez-Rivera, 2009). De Los
Reyes, Lerner, Thomas, Daruwala, and Goepel (2013) explored the implications of emotional
recognition and reported a low non-significant correlation between caregiver and adolescent
EMOTION RECOGNITION AND EMPATHY: LITERATURE REVIEW
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performance on an emotion recognition task (r = .021, p = 0.14). In addition, they found that the
lower caregivers and their children score on emotion recognition tasks, the greater discrepancies
and conflicts they have in their relationship.
Research on relations between caregivers’ and children’s empathic abilities is also
unclear. Van Lissa, Hawk, de Wied, Koot, and van Lier (2014) found that caregiver and
adolescent perspective taking are related, but only between mothers and daughters, not mothers
and sons. Moreover, Farrant, Devine, Maybery, and Fletcher (2004) found an indirect
relationship between caregiver and child empathy such that high levels of maternal cognitive
empathy were associated with child cognitive empathy skills but only because mothers high in
maternal cognitive empathy also engage in positive parenting in which they encourage their
children to take others’ perspectives. Paradoxically, three studies found very small, nonsignificant correlations and therefore no evidence of intergenerational transmission of empathic
abilities and perspective taking (Oguz & Akyol, 2008 (p values ranged from -.16 to .19); Strayer
& Roberts, 1989 (r = -.20 for mothers, r = <.15 for fathers); 2004 (r = .07 for mothers, r = -.13 to
.12 for father). They concluded children’s empathy is not directly related to caregivers’ empathy
in that it may be only one of many factors that influence empathy in children (Strayer & Roberts,
1989). Due to such inconsistent findings, the question of whether empathy is intergenerationally
transmitted remains unclear.
In regards to the second goal of the current study, there is no research on whether
caregivers and children show similar biases in their emotion recognition errors. However, a
literature does exist on the intergenerational transmission of hostile attributional biases, and this
literature may be relevant to the question at hand. Hostile attributional bias is when people
interpret ambiguous situations or stimuli as angry/hostile without information that would
EMOTION RECOGNITION AND EMPATHY: LITERATURE REVIEW
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uncover the true intentions of the situation or stimuli (Dodge, 1980). Overall, the literature is
equivocal about whether hostile attribution biases are intergenerationally transmitted. Three
existing studies support intergenerational transmission. Specifically, Werner (2012) and Nelson,
Mitchell, and Yang (2008) found that mothers who tend to make hostile attributions also had
children who displayed hostile attribution biases with their peers, although a similar correlation
was not found between fathers and their children. A gender difference also emerged in a study by
MacBrayer, Milich, and Hundley (2003) in which hostile attributions were intergenerationally
transmitted between mothers and daughters but not mothers and sons. However, Halligan,
Cooper, Healy, and Murray (2007) found no significant correlations between caregivers’ and
children’s hostile attribution biases, suggesting that more research needs to be done on both the
intergenerational transmission of this construct and on the broader construct of biases in emotion
recognition errors.
Our third goal is to examine if emotion recognition, anger bias, and empathy are related
constructs in both children and caregivers. For children, previous literature has found
correlations between emotion recognition and empathy. For example, Carr and Lutjemeier
(2005) found a moderate positive relationship between the constructs in that children who could
accurately recognize fearful emotions via facial expressions also demonstrated higher empathic
abilities. Belacchi and Farina (2012) also found a correlation between empathy and emotion
comprehension in children. They concluded that “…emotion recognition is a prerequisite for
empathy”, and that the better children are at perspective taking, the better they are at
understanding emotions (Belacchi & Farina, 2012). In regards to adults, the literature is sparser,
with much of the focus of emotion recognition and empathy on their roles in Autism Spectrum
Disorder. Golan, Baron-Cohen, Hill, and Golan (2006) found that adults with Autism Spectrum
EMOTION RECOGNITION AND EMPATHY: LITERATURE REVIEW
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Disorder have trouble with both recognizing emotions and the ability to empathize, which they
propose shows that the two constructs are related. More generally, Konrath, Corneille, Bushman,
and Luminet (2014) state that emotion recognition and empathy must be related because
individuals need to be able to read others’ emotions in order to empathize. In their study, they
found that the more empathic an adult was, the better he or she was at recognizing emotions
(Konrath, et al., 2014). In the current study, examining caregivers’ and children’s self-reports of
empathy and performances on an emotion recognition task may help to us further understand
whether emotion recognition and empathy are related constructs.
To recap, the first goal of the current study was to examine relations between caregivers’
and children’s emotion recognition and empathic abilities to explore the possibility that these
skills are intergenerationally transmitted. We hypothesized significant positive relations between
caregivers’ and children’s emotion recognition and empathy. The second goal was to investigate
whether caregivers and children show similar biases toward mis-identifying other emotions as
anger. We predicted significant positive relations between caregivers’ and children’s anger
biases. Finally, the third goal was to explore whether emotion recognition skills, anger bias, and
empathy for others are related in both caregivers and children. Based on the literature, we
predicted that emotion recognition skills and empathy would be positively correlated with each
other in both caregivers and children while those two constructs would be negatively correlated
with anger bias.
The current study is marked by a number of noteworthy strengths. As reviewed above,
much of the literature in this area is weak and equivocal, and the investigation is designed to
clarify findings in several ways. First, the study includes measures of emotion recognition and
empathy in both caregivers and children in one study, allowing for a thorough examination of the
EMOTION RECOGNITION AND EMPATHY: LITERATURE REVIEW
relations between these constructs within both child samples and adult samples, as well as an
exploration of the intergenerational transmission of emotion recognition and empathy. Second,
the investigation assesses emotion recognition through a well-validated performance-based task
(the Reading the Eyes of the Mind task). Finally, this study is the first to include a measure of
anger bias alongside measures of emotion recognition and empathy in both caregivers and
children, allowing for an exploration of the intergenerational transmission of this bias as well as
an examination of how this bias relates to caregivers’ and children’s levels of empathy.
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EMOTION RECOGNITION AND EMPATHY: LITERATURE REVIEW
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References
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