How
empathy unfolds The moment Hope, just nine months old, saw another baby fall
rs welled up in her own eyes and she crawled off to be comforted
by her mother, as though it were she who had been hurt And
smonth-old Michael went to get his own teddy bear for his crying
for him. Both these small acts of sympathy and caring were
d by mothers trained to record such incidents of empathy
in action. The results of the study suggest that the roots of empathy
can be traced to infancy. Virtually from the day they are born infants
are upset when they hear another infant cryin
a response some
see as the earliest precursor of empathy
Developmental psychologists have found that infants feel
sympathetic distress even before they fully realize that they exis
apart from other people
a few months after birth. infants
react to a disturbance in those around them as though it were their
own eys when they see another child's tear
they start to realize the misery is not their own but someone else's,
though they still seem confused over what
about it. In resear
by Martin L. Hoffman at New York Univers
rear-old brought his own mothe:
or to comfort
ignor ns the friends mother, who was also in the room. This
confusion is seen too when one-year-olds imitate the distress of
someone else, possibly to better comprehend what they are feeling;
for example, if another baby hurts her fingers, a one-year-old might
put her own fingers in her mouth to see if she hurts, too. On seeing
his mother cry, one baby wiped his own eyes, though they had ne
ears
Such motor mimicry, as it is called, is the original technical sense of
the word empathy as it was first used in the 1920s by E B. Titchener,
an American psychologist. Titchener's theory was that empathy
semmed from a sort of physical imitation of the distress of another,
which then evokes the same feelings in oneself. He sought a word
that would be distinct from sympathy, which can be felt for the
seneral plight of another with no sharing whatever of what that
person is feelin
