Compassion arises in the second year of life

The more sensitive the mothers in the study were to their children’s needs, the better they were able to show compassion to strangers in their second year of life. According to the research team, to experience compassion, a child must be able to distinguish between himself and others. This ability only develops during the second year of life and can be recognized, for example, by the fact that children recognize themselves in the mirror.

Regulate emotions
“From an early age, small children allow themselves to be infected by the feelings of others, such as fear or sadness (…). Compassion is about being able to regulate emotion and not be overwhelmed by it,” says Markus Paulus, chair of developmental psychology at the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich. The feeling helps ‘to respond to the fate of others and to deal with it adequately. It is a motivation to stand up for others, to stand up for others,” said co-author Tamara Becher in a press release.

127 mother-infant pairs were observed
For the study, the team observed 127 mother-child pairs during behavioral experiments for a year and a half. Signs of compassion in children were recorded in four different moments in playful situations. For example, they observed another person lightly bumping into themselves and feeling pain. The little ones’ reaction was compared to their behavior when they saw someone else laughing. The first time the children observed were six months old, and in the last experiment they were one and a half years old.

“A child could not survive without sensitive caregivers who act with compassion. The children learn from them how to deal with negative emotions. This allows them to apply it themselves later,” says Paulus.