Empathy and pseudo-empathy: the affective judgments of first- and third-graders

Eighty male and female first- and third-grader Ss were presented one of two brief videotaped social interaction episodes. Half of the Ss viewed an unambiguous tape in which a target character's affective response was congruent with the situational context in which he operated. The remaining Ss viewed a similar, but ambiguous tape in which the nonverbal affective response of the target character was incongruent with situational demands. Ss' responses were scored on the basis of their judgments of the target character's affective state and facial expression, and the degree of relative certainty with which they made their affective judgments. No differences were predicted or found in any of the empathic responses of first- and third-graders to the unambiguous tape. The two age groups studied did, however, differ significantly in their responses to the ambiguous tape. As anticipated, the first-grade Ss employed a highly centered inference strategy and based their judgments on only one of the available incongruous cues. The older Ss, by contrast, recognized the incongruities present and expressed little confidence in their ability to infer the true affect state of the target character.