The Impact of Developing Social Perspective‐taking Skills on Emotionality in Middle and Late Childhood

Abstract

A sample of 209 children was followed longitudinally to examine the impact of growing perspective-taking skills on positive and negative emotionality in middle and late childhood.Perspective-taking skills were assessed through interviews. Teachers rated children's emotional reactivity and capacity to regain a neutral state following emotional arousal.Analyses of contemporaneous data revealed that more developed perspective-taking skills were associated with moderate levels of emotional reactivity. In addition, in children with high emotional reactivity, good perspective-taking skills were associated with good capacity to regain a neutral affective state following emotional arousal. Longitudinal analyses revealed that children who made gains in perspective-taking skills over a two-year-period became more moderate in negative emotional reactivity and improved their ability to down-regulate strong positive emotions. The overall findings support the notion that children use perspective-taking skills as a tool for optimal regulation of emotional responses.

Cognitive and emotional empathy in typically developing children: The influence of age, gender, and intelligence

“…These results are in line with the majority of behavioural studies on age differences in emotion recognition (Beek & Dubas, 2008b;Golan et al, 2008) and perspective taking (Aldrich et al, 2011;Bengtsson & Arvidsson, 2011) in typically developing children. There is reason to conclude that older children and adolescents show a superior performance especially in emotion recognition tasks with higher demands, respectively the recognition of secondary emotions and the perspective taking in complex social situations.…”

“…With regard to emotional perspective taking, results confirm previous studies conducted with school-aged children and adolescents (Bengtsson & Arvidsson, 2011;Mayberry & Espelage, 2007). Since other studies with preschool children did not find such gender differences (Charman et al, 2002), we conclude that gender differences become stronger with the transition from preschool to school age, either because of developmental or socialization reasons.…”

“…Research on gender differences in perspective taking frequently targeted theory of mind (ToM) competencies rather than pure emotional perspective taking. Studies with preschool children reported comparable or only slightly better ToM skills in girls (Charman, Ruffman, & Clements, 2002), while studies with older children and adolescents observed stronger gender effects with girls scoring higher than boys (Bengtsson & Arvidsson, 2011;Mayberry & Espelage, 2007). In addition, Light et al (2009) found slightly increased emotional empathy in girls.…”

“…With regard to cognitive and emotional empathy (Decety & Michalska, 2009), age-related changes in the activation of underlying neural structures were found in fMRI studies (van den Bos, van Dijk, Westenberg, Rombouts, & Crone, 2011). Several behavioural studies concentrating on single aspects of cognitive empathy indicated improvement in emotion recognition (Herba, Landau, Russell, Ecker, & Phillips, 2006;Williams et al, 2009) and perspective taking (Aldrich, Tenenbaum, Brooks, Harrison, & Sines, 2011;Bengtsson & Arvidsson, 2011) with age. There is some evidence that beyond early infancy, especially the recognition of complex secondary emotions is influenced by age (Golan, Baron-Cohen, & Golan, 2008).…”

E-Mental Health and Counselor Training

“…But it more generally refers to simply seeing things from the perspective of others. Developmentally, Perspective Taking or Social Perspective Taking is used describe children's growing ability to understand others' feelings and perspective (Bengtsson, and Arvidsson, 2011;Schwenck et at., 2013).…”