title: Children's perceptions and comforting strategies to infant crying: relations to age, sex, and empathy-related responding.
abstract: This study aimed to examine child characteristics associated with the understanding of and responses to infant crying. Seven hundred and twenty-four 1st to 7th grade children (383 boys, 341 girls) were shown a picture depicting a crying infant, whereupon they were asked to generate the potential causes for infant crying along with the action responses that they might utilize to assist a crying baby. Self-reports of children's empathy-related responding were also obtained. As hypothesized, an age-related increase in the number, variety, and quality for causes for infant crying and strategies to help a crying infant were observed. Girls generated a higher mean number and variety of causes compared to boys. For older children (grades 4-7), dimensions of empathy-related responding, namely sympathy and perspective taking, were significantly associated with the number and variety of causes for infant crying and caregiving strategies. The findings support the conclusion for a developmental progression of understanding of facial expressions of infant crying across middle childhood.
authors.affiliation: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
authors.forename: Nicole L A
authors.initials: NL
authors.lastname: Catherine
authors.forename: Kimberly A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Schonert-Reichl
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003448:Crying; D056348:Emotional Intelligence; D004645:Empathy; D005260:Female; D006379:Helping Behavior; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D008297:Male; D035863:Moral Development; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D002666:Psychology, Child; D056345:Theory of Mind