{"id":612,"date":"2009-12-27T10:23:26","date_gmt":"2009-12-27T15:23:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=612"},"modified":"2009-12-27T10:23:26","modified_gmt":"2009-12-27T15:23:26","slug":"follow-up-from-matthew-campbell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=612","title":{"rendered":"Follow-up from Matthew Campbell"},"content":{"rendered":"

The whole child empathy thing<\/a>. I wrote to the scientist who gave the lecture and he replied:<\/p>\n

There is a study that looked at contagious yawning in children of different ages. They found that children younger than 5 did not show it, so your observation fits in with this. I’m a little surprised by this simply because contagious yawning is involuntary, and it’s been observed in monkeys and dogs which do not show complex theory-of-mind (it’s debated whether chimpanzees do or not).<\/p>\n

More complexity comes because children do show other rudimentary signs of empathy from birth. Babies in a nursery will cry when another cries in a sign of emotional contagion, that simplest form of empathy I talked about.<\/p>\n

By year 1-2, kids show signs of concern if someone is in distress. I’m sure you’ve seen something like this in your daughter. It’s not sophisticated “targeted helping”, but it is empathy\/sympathy. They feel the emotion and try to comfort, they just don’t know how to yet.<\/p>\n

Why contagious yawning does not appear to come online until later is a bit of a mystery to me. Perhaps there are some other forms of automatic emotional\/motor mirroring that come online at the same time, and it would be interesting to know if theory-of-mind development is casually related (and not just a coincidence of timing). Unfortunately, we do not have any young chimpanzees (we are not breeding). If we did, we would definitely look at the development of contagious yawning in them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The whole child empathy thing. I wrote to the scientist who gave the lecture and he replied: There is a study that looked at contagious yawning in children of different ages. They found that children younger than 5 did not show it, so your observation fits in with this. I’m a little surprised by this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-and-such"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}