The purpose of the present study was to examine the prediction of adults' situational and dispositional empathy-related responses from measures of emotionality (emotional intensity and positive and negative affect) and regulation. A multimethod approach including self-reported, facial, and heart rate (HR) responses was used to assess situational vicarious emotional responding; Ss' (and sometimes friends') reports were used to assess the dispositional characteristics. In general, dispositional sympathy, personal distress, and perspective taking exhibited different, conceptually logical patterns of association with indexes of emotionality and regulation. The relations of situational measures of vicarious emotional responding to dispositional emotionality and regulation varied somewhat by type of measure and gender. Findings for facial and HR (for men) measures were primarily for the more evocative empathy-inducing stimulus. In general, the findings provided support for the role of individual differences in emotionality and regulation in empathy-related responding.

Infants' orienting of attention undergoes marked development in thefirst six months offije, and changes in attentionaf control appear to be related to infants' susceptibility to distress.Our study of individual differences in temperament has led us to an interest in the interaction between emotion and such self-regulatory processes as attention (Rothbart, Posner, and Boylan, 1990). We have defined temperament as individual differences in reactivity and self-regulation assumed to have a constitutional basis, influenced over time by the interaction of heredity, maturation, and experience (Rothbart, 1989; Rothbart and Derrybeny, 1981). The distinction between reactivity and self-regulation is useful because it allows us to consider individual differences in self-regulatory systems that serve important organizing functions with respect to motor activity and emotion.In our studies of self-reported temperament in adults and adolescents and caregiver-reported temperament in children, we have found that higher levels of reported attennonal control are related to lower susceptibility to distress (Capaldi and Rothbart, 1990; Denyberry and Rothbart, 1988; Rothbart and Hershey, 1990). We have therefore undertaken a collaboration between attention and temperament development projects at Oregon in an effort to illuminate the interaction between self-regulation and emotion during early development (Rothbart, Posner, and Boylan, .1990). In this chapter we report on some of the results of this collaborative work and describe our longitudinal study of self-regulation.In our work on the development of attention, we focus on the development of attentional controls as related to neural development and to the infant's susceptibility to distress (Johnson, Posner, and Rothbart, 1991). The first NEW DIRECTIONS FOR CHILD DMLOPMENT. no. 55, Spring 1992 @ J O W y -b S Publishers

Are gender labeling and gender stereotyping in 24-, 30-, and 36-month-old children related to each other and to mothers' sex-role attitudes and responses to sex-typed behavior in a free-play situation with their children? The gender stereotyping measure indicated that gender schemata include information that is metaphorically rather than literally associated with each sex. Children who understood labels for boys and girls displayed more knowledge of gender stereotypes than children who did not. Mothers whose children had mastered labels for boys and girls endorsed more traditional attitudes toward women and toward sex roles within the family. The same mothers also initiated and reinforced more sex-typed toy play with their children.

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