Welcome to Your Child's Brain: How the Mind Grows From Conception to College by Sandra Aamodt & Sam Wang

Author:Sandra Aamodt & Sam Wang [Sandra Aamodt & Sam Wang]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pediatrics, Science, Medical, General, Child Development, Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9781596916494
Google: 3AHIfM7kviQC
Amazon: 1596916494
Barnesnoble: 1596916494
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2011-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

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DID YOU KNOW? SELF-CONTROL PROMOTES EMPATHY

Babies often cry when they hear another baby crying, in the contagious form of empathy (see chapter 19). True empathy, the ability to appreciate other people’s feelings, develops by age five. Children show great gains in self-control during that same period, and individual children who have better self-control also show more empathy and a more developed conscience. Similarly, children who are better at inhibiting an automatic behavioral response (for example, by saying “day” when shown a picture of the moon, instead of “night”) tend to have a more sophisticated ability to imagine what other people are thinking and feeling, even when age, intelligence, and working memory are taken into account.

What’s the connection? To develop empathy, children need to have a certain ability to entertain alternatives and hypothetical possibilities, which is part of self-control. The prefrontal and anterior cingulate regions of the cortex are involved in both self-control and empathy, so cortical development may limit children’s ability to understand other people’s feelings and their ability to control themselves. As part of the brain’s attention-regulation system, the anterior cingulate is active when children concentrate on their own behavior or on other people’s feelings. Such concentration may be a necessary first step in the development of both these important functions. The prefrontal cortex is important for behavioral inhibition, and it is active during theory-of-mind tasks, which require people to concentrate on what someone else could know.

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