Empathy Helps Kids Understand Sarcasm: Study

Greater the empathy skills in kids, easier it is for them to recognize sarcasm, says a study.

The study conducted by Penny Pexman, Juanita Whalen and Andrew Nicholson states that kids find it difficult to understand sarcastic language. It is at the age of 6-8 that they start recognizing sarcasm. They start getting familiar sarcastic phrases like 'Thanks a lot' 'Nice going' . But few kids take a longer time to start understanding sarcasm with detection improving even through adolescence. Through this study the researchers investigated whether the difference in the children's ability to empathize with others might help in answering why some kids take long to understand sarcasm.

The researchers focused mainly on empathy as they believed for the kid to understand sarcasm they must understand the attitude as well as emotions of the speaker.

The researchers conducted a study on 31 children of ages 8-9. They conducted a task that required identifying sarcasm. The children were made to watch a series of puppet shows that included sarcastic or non sarcastic praise. The children were asked to select a mean toy shark if they thought the puppet said something sarcastically else they were made to pick a nice duck. They tested each kid 12 times with various puppets and scenarios. They measured the empathy skills of the kids separately.

The researchers noted that half of the time, the kids were able to identify sarcasm and those kids with strong empathy skills performed more accurately. The kids with stronger empathy skills were twice as accurate compared to kids who were not so good at recognising emotions. Initially the same test was conducted on kids 6-7 years old, but they revealed zero accuracy for sarcasm.

Apart from this, during the sarcasm recognition task, the kids' eye gaze was also quantified in order to find clues about their understanding. They measured whether the kids looked at the duck or shark when they took time to choose.

Prof. Pexman concluded, "Sarcastic language, especially in unfamiliar forms, is a real challenge for most children," explains "Even when children did not recognize a remark as sarcastic, there was evidence in their reactions that the children with stronger empathy skills were sensitive to the speaker's intent. This study helps us understand why some children deal better with this challenge than others and provides new insights about development of this complex aspect of emotion recognition. It also puts us in a better position to help children who are struggling with this challenge".

The findings were published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.