Abstract

Parental empathy may play an important role in promoting children's cognitive, social and emotional development, by sensitively interpreting their mental states and providing an appropriate environment. To explore this possibility, this study examined whether maternal empathy in infancy predicts a child's later executive function, theory of mind, and empathy development through longitudinal data from 69 mother-child dyads. We found that maternal empathy, measured when a child was 14-20 months old, predicted the child's emotion contagion at 60 months, even when controlling for maternal education and family income. However, this influence did not exceed the child's vocabulary on executive function or theory of mind (emotion, belief understanding, etc.). These findings suggest that the types of individual differences in parental empathy measured in our study may be limited in predicting long-term developmental outcome of executive functioning and theory of mind.