Infants Express Sympathy to People in Distress through Non-Verbal Communication

If you think your baby is unaware of the problems you are going through then you are wrong. A latest study states that although infants cannot verbally communicate they can still express sympathy to those in pain through their own non-verbal methods.

A study by Japanese researchers at Kyoto University and Toyohashi University of Technology found that infants have a  sense of empathy toward people around them.

The researchers examined the responses of 10-month-olds to an animated video that had a victim and an aggressor, a blue ball and yellow cube. In the first video the babies were shown the blue ball chasing the yellow cube and crushing it completely. In the second video the roles of the yellow cube and blue ball were switched and were shown to  babies in the control group. These geometric figures had no contact with each other.

The researchers found that when these shapes were placed in front of the babies they reached for the victims instead of the aggressor. This means that the babies examined the shapes of the figures and chose the one in distress.

"These results cannot be explained by low-level perceptual interpretations at least such as movement speed, kinetic momentum, and deformation, because they were the same for the two figures," the researchers wrote in the study.

In order to check that the babies avoided the aggressor, the researchers added a third geometric shape that moved independently along with the other two geometric shapes. They conducted this test on 24 babies of 10-month-old and found that in both cases these infants preferred the victims over aggressors.

"These findings indicate that 10-month-olds not only evaluate the roles of victims and aggressors in interactions, but also show rudimentary sympathy toward others in distress based on that evaluation," the authors stated. "This simple preference may function as a foundation for full-fledged sympathetic behaviour later on."

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.