Sympathetic Concern
The next evolutionary step from emotional empathy is sympathetic concern. Sympathetic concern involves emotional contagion together with contextual appraisal of the eliciting situation (de Waal, 2008). Sympathy is an affective response elicited from another's situation but does not involve the automatic sharing of the other's emotion (Eisenberg, 2002). Thus, this is the beginning of the separation between emotions originating internally and externally (de Waal, 2008).
Developmentally, those as young as 12 months old have been found to comfort distressed others (Warneken & Tomasello, 2009); however, it is unclear whether such sympathetic responses reflect true concern for others or an attempt to alleviate aversive vicarious arousal (de Waal, 2008). To the author's understanding, it is for this reason that sympathetic concern is considered the mediator between the innate and higher cognitive empathy systems; it appears more than mere emotional contagion but less than true cognitive empathy.
Recently, however, children aged18-25 months have demonstrated sympathy toward others to whom something negative had happened but who were not expressing distress (Vaish, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009). While this finding casts doubt on the notion that young children are only capable of rudimentary forms of empathy, a limitation of this study is that the parents may have been subtly influencing their children’s responses. Thus, further research is needed in this regard.
