Guilt serves vital prosocial functions: It motivates transgressors to make amends, thus restoring damaged relationships. Previous developmental research on guilt has not clearly distinguished it from sympathy for a victim or a tendency to repair damage in general. The authors tested 2- and 3-year-old children (N = 62 and 64, respectively) in a 2 × 2 design, varying whether or not a mishap cause...

Perceiving distress cues appears to be associated with prosocial responding. This being the case, it was hypothesised that the fear facial expression would elicit prosocial responding in perceivers. In Study 1, participants indicated that fear and sadness expressions would be associated with greater sympathy and willingness to help the expresser than would neutral expressions. In Study 2, parti...

This study reports the development of The Scale of Social Interest for Elementary School Children and examines its reliability and validity. Elementary school students of fourth, fifth, and sixth grades responded to provisional items of the scale, as well as scales assessing mental health, adaptation to school, and sympathy. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted using the provisional ite...

This study investigated possible mediators of the identifiable victim effect (IVE), the proportion dominance effect (PDE), and the in-group effect (IGE) in helping situations. In Studies 1–3, participants rated their emotional reactions (distress and sympathy toward the victims), perceived impact of helping, perceived responsibility to help, and helping motivation toward four versions of a help...

We develop an extensible description logic for stating the content of optimalitytheoretic constraints in phonology, and specify a class of structures for interpreting it. The aim is a transparent formalisation of OT. We show how to state a wide range of constraints, including markedness, input–output faithfulness and base–reduplicant faithfulness. However, output–output correspondence and ‘inte...

Objective: To complicate understandings of the emotions involved in the surgical encounter. Methods: I draw on an extensive body of historical material to demonstrate the importance of compassion and sympathy to the professional identities and experiences of early nineteenth-century British surgeons and use this information to reflect on what lessons can be learned for contemporary practice. Re...

DARWIN’S LITTLE KNOWN DISCUSSION OF SYMPATHY reveals a facet of his thinking unknown to many, which is contrary to the competitive, ruthless, and selfish view of human nature that has been mistakenly attributed to a Darwinian perspective. In 1871, 11 years before his death, Darwin’s greatest unread book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, was published. In the fourth chapter,...

Despite its essential role in human coexistence, the developmental origins and progression of sympathy in infancy are not yet fully understood. We show that preverbal 10-month-olds manifest sympathetic responses, evinced in their preference for attacked others according to their evaluations of the respective roles of victim, aggressor, and neutral party. In Experiment 1, infants viewing an aggr...

This study proposed and tested an integrated model of the intergenerational transmission of empathy-related responding in adolescence. This model included maternal support as a mediator of the intergenerational transmission of empathy and examined friendship quality as an outcome of adolescent empathy. In a sample of middle adolescents and their mothers (N = 177), maternal support significantly...

I have shown here the different roles that sympathy plays in the accounts of justice in the Treatise and Enquiry. In the former work, a redirected sympathy naturally extends our concern, and subsequently our moral approval or blame, to all those included within the scope of the rules of justice. In the Enquiry, we find this same progress of sentiments, but Hume’s introduction of the sentiment o...