Ten-Month-Old Infants Use Non-Verbal Ways to Express Sympathy

A Japanese research team found that infants as young as 10 months old use non-verbal ways to express sympathy for others in distress.

The study, conducted by Yasuhiro Kanakogi and colleagues from Kyoto University and Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan, revealed that even before they could speak, babies develop empathy.

Since infants at this age assign goals and intentions to geometric figures, the researchers worked with a series of animated videos that had a victim and an aggressor i.e., a blue ball and a yellow cube. This was done to check the response of the infant in an aggressive situation.

In the first video, the infants watched the yellow cube being chased by the blue cube, where it was attacked and crushed violently. In the next sequence, the roles of the cubes were exchanged. Another set of the control group saw a video sequence in which there was no contact between the geometric shapes. After showing the infants the video, the researchers appointed an assistant who didn't have any idea about the research experiment. This research assistant presented the two shapes to the infants, and both were placed away from each other, reports Medical Daily.

The researchers noticed that after viewing the video, the infants reached to the victim instead of the aggressor. This shows that the infants assessed the shapes based on their previous interaction and chose the one that was in distress.

"These results cannot be explained by low-level perceptual interpretations at least such as movement speed, kinetic momentum, and deformation, because they were the same for the two figures." 

To check whether the choice the infants made was to avoid the aggressor, they added another geometric shape. They conducted the next test on 24 infants of the age 10 months. In this, the third object moved independently of other two shapes with constant speed. They noticed that in both the experiments, the kids preferred the victims and not aggressors.

"These findings indicate that 10-month-olds not only evaluate the roles of victims and aggressors in interactions, but also show rudimentary sympathy toward others in distress based on that evaluation," they concluded. "This simple preference may function as a foundation for full-fledged sympathetic behaviour later on."

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.