Do Empathy and Guilt Encourage Children to Help Others?
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Our research shows that empathy and guilt play distinct but important roles in children’s moral development and helping behavior.
- Empathy and guilt rely on partially distinct neural systems, suggesting they develop through different psychological and biological processes (McDonald et al., 2023).
- Children’s emotion regulation influences whether guilt functions in adaptive or maladaptive ways (Buote et al., 2025).
- Toddlers can learn new prosocial behaviors by observing others, but guilt interferes with this learning when children believe they caused another person’s distress (Donohue & Tully, 2020; Donohue et al., 2020; Williamson et al., 2012).
- When children have opportunities to repair harm using familiar reparative behaviors, they show increases in empathy and prosocial behavior (Donohue et al., 2019).
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What Do Children’s Responses to Their Mothers’ Emotions Reveal About Mental Health Risk?
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Children’s interpretations of and responses to their mothers’ emotions may provide important clues about emotional adjustment and risk for anxiety and depression.
- A positivity bias in interpreting mothers’ emotions is common in early childhood, and children who show weaker positivity biases report more internalizing problems (Donohue & Tully, 2016).
- Sharing in a mother’s happiness is associated with fewer internalizing symptoms among children of nondepressed mothers but more internalizing symptoms among children of depressed mothers (Tully & Donohue, 2016).
- Activity in brain regions involved in perspective-taking increases in response to both mothers’ and strangers’ emotions, but activity in emotion-reactivity regions was heightened in response to mothers’ sadness, suggesting a uniquely strong empathic response to a mother’s distress (Farris et al., 2025).
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Is Empathy a “Risky Strength”?
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Although empathy is often protective, its benefits depend on children’s emotion regulation abilities and social environments.
- Empathy is associated with positive psychological adjustment when paired with strong emotion regulation and supportive family relationships, but it increases vulnerability in dysregulated or unpredictable environments (Tone & Tully, 2014; Tully & Donohue, 2017).
- Responses to others’ positive emotions may be especially important. Young children tend to show a “positivity bias,” readily noticing and responding to positive emotions, and stronger positivity biases are linked to greater prosocial behavior and fewer internalizing symptoms (Donohue et al., 2017; Garcia et al., 2020).
- Both sympathetic concern and personal distress in response to mother’s anger and sadness support children’s understanding of their mothers’ emotions (Tully, Donohue, & Garcia, 2015).
- Moderate, well-regulated empathy, rather than high or low empathy, is associated with lower risk for depression (Tully, Ames, Garcia, & Donohue, 2016.
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How Do Parent-Child Interactions Shape Children’s Emotion Learning?
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Parent-child interactions play important but nuanced roles in children’s emotional development.
- Parents’ emotion coaching is associated with children’s more sophisticated understanding of others’ emotions, although children’s learning varies depending on the content of parent-child emotion conversations (Buote et al., 2025).
- During parent-child interactions, both physiological regulation that supports perspective-taking and physiological reactivity that promotes emotion sharing are linked to better understanding of mothers’ emotions (Tully et al., 2015).
- Parents’ positive responsivity during early childhood protects against later internalizing problems, particularly among emotionally dysregulated children. At the same time, children with internalizing problems are less likely to receive positive parenting over time (Thompson et al., 2025).
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