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The Importance Of Empathy To Children

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Recommended: Child Development of Empathy, a Skill You Can Teach, Train and Encourage

Can Empathy Be Taught to Children? INTRODUCTION: Empathy is one of the fundamental traits in determining a human. By textbook definitions, empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. The ability to feel and express empathy is one of the main characteristics of people. However, the lack of empathy is commonly associated with psychopathy. The term psychopath is used so frequently these days that it has almost lost all meaning. The term refers to a cluster of personality traits linked to patterns of antisocial behaviours. Statistically, around 1% of Americans are psychopaths. Although there are cases where psychopaths are violent criminals, not all psychopaths turn out to be violent (Turner, 2015). With the likes …show more content…

All these traits are similarly associated with psychopathy, therefore it is claimed that children can be psychopaths or become future violent psychopaths. It is important to understand the basics of psychopathy, as it is an increasing topic around the world. Since the lack of empathy is one of the predominant influences in distinguishing and creating a psychopath, and since some children can present psychopathic tendencies, is it possible to teach children empathy to prevent them from becoming violent psychopaths as adults? …show more content…

in 1992, measured how monozygotic and dizygotic twin children between 14 and 20 months responded to stimulated distress. The premise of this study is that the correlation in empathy levels is greater in monozygotic twins in comparison to dizygotic twins show how impactful hereditary factors are. Large heritability measurements were found in 14 month old kids for various types of empathetic response includes prosocial behaviours, concern, and more. By 20 months old, empathetic concern and another response called unresponsive-indifferent behaviour were visibly having greater correlation between the monozygotic compared to the dizygotic twins. Proving that a part of individual difference in empathizing is more likely to be caused by genetic differences. In 2008 Knafo et al. expanded on this study, with twins between the ages of 24 to 36 months. The aim of this study was to investigate the relative contributions of genetics and shared environment to development of empathy (McDonald 8). The study was able to find that the part of variance in empathy dealing with heritability effects increased as they age, whereas the part associated with shared environment effects decreased as they age. After this research, heritability was held accountable for almost a half of the variation in empathy within children. Through these two studies, it becomes evident the importance of genetic influences, in collaboration with some environmental

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