Infant Development: Perspectives from German Speaking Countries

Theoretical considerations Empathy from a cognitivistic viewpoint According to current understanding empathy is an experience in which people participate in or share the emotional state of somebody else on the basis of this person's expression and/or their situation. The emphasis on the emotional dimension expressed in this definition is rather new. Under Piagetian influence, empathy was more or less equated with cognitive abilities such as role-or perspective-taking. Only recently has its affective component been reacknowledged, but exactly which processes underly the empathic experience is still a matter of controversy. In particular, opinions differ as to whether empathy by itself may be called a mechanism of social cognition supplying insight into another person's emotional state, or whether additional cognitive achievements have to be drawn on to procure this insight, and if so, how they are to be defined Among the authors who still emphasize the predominant role of cognitive factors in the empathic process is Feshbach (1978, 1986). She postulates two cognitive and one affective preconditions to empathy: (a) The ability to discriminate and label affective states in others; (b) the ability to assume the perspective and role of another person; (c) emotional responsiveness, that is, the affective ability to experience emotions. The ability to discriminate and label emotions is usually tested by exposing the subjects to pictures of a person expressing these emotions. At the age of three, children begin to identify some emotions properly, but their performance remains imperfect up to the Feshbach used a similar setting to investigate what she called empathy. She developed a series of picture stories showing a child hero in an emotion-evoking situation. Her subjects were first asked to verbally identify this emotion. In a second step, they had to specify what they themselves felt when inspecting the picture stories. Inasmuch as their own feeling matched the emotion of the hero, empathy was supposed to be present (Feshbach & Roe, 1968). As may be expected, the children were more likely to correctly identify the hero's emotion than they were to declare they felt the same 2 emotion, so Feshbach concluded that comprehension of another person's affect – that is, cognitive performance-is an undispensible prerequisite for feeling with another. Role or perspective taking means imagining oneself at another person's place and, on this basis, understanding another's point of view and manner of thinking or feeling. Usually this achievement is ascribed to decentering as opposed to …