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How Moral education shapes the way someone acts: Moral Education

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How Moral education shapes the way someone acts: Moral Education

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During the events of To Kill A Mockingbird, we see Scout grow and develop as a character. The way she acts and behaves slowly changes and warps changing the outcome of certain events. This is all because of the moral education she receives from people such as Calpurnia and Atticus. We see multiple times through out the book that they continue to teach Scout lessons about their current situation, which most of the time works.

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Moral education is basically a training which shows us the right and just way to lead our lives. Being honest, just, legitimate, accommodative, generous, to share love and care, show consideration and sensitivity are basic principles of moral education. It is more of a practice which enriches the way of our lifestyle.

Moral education can be rendered at home, school, by tutors, elders and parents. It is best taught by practicing what is right and just in front of the kid. It is an education for all and can be done at each and every time. It is not limited by geographical boundaries and skilled trainers. It is best taught by shown practical examples.

Every young parent should be very attentive toward their children's requirement of moral education. Childhood is the most vulnerable period which impacts the overall development of an individual's personality. As a parent be attentive about what your kid is learning and from where. As a parent, you need to be careful about the peer and friends your child might have and take time out to make them understand what's right and wrong.

Children are the foundation of our society the torchbearers of our nation. As a teacher and an influencer, one must take care of the moral training and basic qualities that are conferred on the children. It will eventually affect the fate of the country as a whole. Moral education is a must to be executed as understudies in school and universities.

Every time a child is caught lying or gets out of hand, necessary counselling has to be given to them. It is important to treat them as an equal and show trust and faith in them and make them confident to take their own calls. They should always be taught that it might be difficult, to tell the truth, but it is always essential to tell the truth. Stories and examples must be shared with them so that they have more clarity of thought. Give them time and treat them with patience at all times.

It is also important to educate children to be disciplined and not to cheat while in class and examinations. They are to be taught that there are no shortcuts in life and life is an examination where there is no syllabus, the only thing that can get them though is a good character and speaking the truth at all times.

It is important to educate children about the phenomenal activists and legends who exemplifies strength and has shown character to fight against all odds and champion the right causes to bring revolutionary changes. These reformers and prophets should be the role models that the youth should follow and look up to. Assist your children to find a cause worth working for, make them contribute to voluntary services and helping the needy. When they start these as a habit from childhood, they can take it forward in their lives. Each child can make a significant contribution in their own way.

It is also important to tell your children the severity of the punishment one might get committing crimes and serious offenses. They must be clear on what is right and wrong. Be a mentor than a parent and talk to your child as a friend, it would be a smoother process for them to learn. Share your past mistakes, its consequences and what you learned from it. Do not discourage their adventurous spirit but teach them to balance it between an adventure and a misadventure.

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it is important to regard each human being as equal. they should also know to take care of their pets and show love and compassion to them and contribute to work at home. gender equality should also be practiced at home and a kid should learn the importan

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It is important to regard each human being as equal. They should also know to take care of their pets and show love and compassion to them and contribute to work at home. Gender equality should also be practiced at home and a kid should learn the importan

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The effect exposure to Perspective taking can have on a child at a young age: Perspective Taking

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The effect exposure to Perspective taking can have on a child at a young age: Perspective Taking

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Through out the book To Kill a Mockingbird, we see Scout having trouble understanding certain aspects of others lives, for example why Walter poured the massive amount of syrup on to his plate. She is later taught to take his perspective, and try to understand how he feels. This is a key point, as we see throughout the rest of the novel, Scout behaves much more kindly towards others like him as she had taken their perspective in the past as she does with new people.

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Seeing and understanding the world from someone else's point of view is an important life skill. Learn why perspective taking is important and ways you can help children develop this essential skill.

April 19, 2016 - Author: ,

Understanding how someone else sees the world is an important life skill.

Each individual experiences the world from their own unique perspective. Two or 200 people can experience the same event and have completely different experiences. Why is it important we understand someone else's point of view?

We do not live in isolation and each person has to engage and work with others in order to be successful or get anything done. In order to work effectively with people, it's incredibly important that we are able to engage in perspective taking. We need to understand how someone else sees the world to be able to work together, communicate and show empathy and understanding. It's an expectation as an adult that you will listen to and respect the opinions and experiences of other people. It's a crucial skill for all relationships, friendships and professional and romantic relationships.

Perspective taking

In her book, "Mind in the Making: The seven essential life skills every child needs," author Ellen Galinsky describes perspective taking as involving several distinct skills, including:

Determining how someone else feels. In order to do this, we have to use our knowledge and understanding of someone while also ignoring our own opinions, thoughts or feelings and trying to figure out how the other person must be feeling or thinking.

Inhibitory control. In order to think about the world from someone else's understanding, we have to put our own thoughts on hold. When we use inhibitory control to engage in perspective taking, we are pausing our own desires to think of someone else.

Cognitive flexibility. In order to switch up our perspective, we have to look outside the box of our normal thinking. This requires cognitive flexibility in helping us change the focus of our attention from ourselves to someone else.

Perspective taking is really a social-emotional-intellectual skill, in that it requires hard work from our brains and also utilizes empathy and understanding.

Supporting the development of perspective taking

Michigan State University Extension has some tips on helping your child learn and practice perspective taking.

Walk the walk. Practicing what you preach can be harder than it seems, but practicing perspective taking with your child is good for you and them. It is easier to be fair and just if we take the time to see how a situation looks from someone else's point of view. Young children learn by watching you, so when you show them the value of perspective taking, they will engage in it too.

Talk about feelings. Anger, sadness and loneliness aren't bad words. Talk about all feelings with your child and teach them that all feelings are valid. Try repeating your child's words to you, describing what you see them doing, asking questions and letting them know you are there to talk if they want.

Acknowledge and respect feelings. Children will be better able to understand others' perspectives when they grow up knowing their thoughts, feelings and experiences were understood and respected. Engage with your child and reflect their feelings back to them, let them know you notice them and are there to help them.

Show them the other side. When you see a stranger stop to help someone on the street, talk to your child about what each person might be feeling or thinking. Help them build connections between people's actions and their motivations. It's also important to help children understand how their behaviors affect other people. If your child throws a toy and it hits another child, help your child build that cause-and-effect connection by talking about how their actions impact other people or their environment.

Train your little detective. Just like real-life detectives search for clues to solve a crime, people who are skilled at perspective taking look for clues to understand other people. Help your child develop these sleuthing skills by encouraging them to observe and evaluate other people's actions or behaviors.

Encourage community. Children learn to value and respect others through the building of community. Encourage your child not only to engage with others, but to work together, collaborate, problem solve and truly value their relationships with others. This mutual respect and sense of kinship will encourage your child to think about other people's points of view.

Create a loving and warm environment. When children are loved, respected and feel safe, they have the capacity and motivation to learn how to understand and respect the perspectives of others.

By teaching your child perspective taking skills, you are giving them all the tools they need to build healthy, happy and successful relationships throughout their lives.

For more articles on child development, academic success, parenting and life skill development, please visit the Michigan State University Extension website.

This article was published by Michigan State University Extension. For more information, visit http://www.msue.msu.edu. To have a digest of information delivered straight to your email inbox, visit http://www.msue.msu.edu/newsletters. To contact an expert in your area, visit http://expert.msue.msu.edu, or call 888-MSUE4MI (888-678-3464).

Tags: early childhood development, family, life skills, msu extension, social and emotional development

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The importance of perspective taking for young children

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Seeing and understanding the world from someone else's point of view is an important life skill. Learn why perspective taking is important and ways you can help children develop this essential skill. April 19, 2016 - Author: , Each individual experiences the world from their own unique perspective.

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How someone can help you through a loss of a loved one: loss 

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How someone can help you through a loss of a loved one: loss 

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This article relates to To Kill a Mockingbird because Jem and Scout loose their mother in the book although having a bigger affect on Jem both Jem and Scout regain that motherly figure through Calpurnia like how at the end of the article it mentions how there is something and someone to help you through the process of loosing someone.

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It's been 10 years since my husband took his final breath. I have lived with, wrestled with and made tentative peace with grief ever since.

My journey through a decade of grief is unlike anyone else's because every single path is unique. There is no lockstep through stages. There is no timeline, no guarantee of expiration.

In these years without Steve, I have prayed with and prayed for friends and acquaintances on their own grief journeys. I've learned to offer advice only when asked, and even then I tread lightly, hesitant to intrude on the sacred process of continuing life with a shattered heart.

Yet, there is value in listening to one another's stories, in making connections, in realizing that we are bound together because we feel pain as deeply as we love. With that in mind, these are some of my truths about grief.

The tug of loss never fully disappears. In the first few months after Steve's death, his absence was the first thing I thought of when I woke up and the last thing I remembered as I fell asleep. Our loss doesn't consume me now, but it never goes away.

When our son graduated from high school this past June, I of course wished that Steve had been sitting next to me in the arena, but I didn't dwell on his absence. I was thankful for the family members and friends who were there, for the people who have helped to sustain us.

A few weeks later, though, the morning before Cooper's college orientation, I broke down in the middle of the hotel dining room. There were matched sets of moms and dads at every other table, but at mine there was only a mom with tears in her oatmeal. That wave of grief came out of nowhere, reminding me of its fickle ways.

You can curate your own healthy ways to cope. Cooper, Katie and I find solace by honoring Steve in small, everyday ways. I share Steve stories and photos. We listen to his music and watch his favorite movies.

Cooper inherited Steve's quick wit and sarcasm. Katie inherited his gift of storytelling. They may not remember the tenor and tone of his voice, but they often sound just like him, with familiar phrases and observations.

We go all out to remember him on Nov. 4. For eight years now, we've celebrated Steve's birthday by encouraging acts of kindness in his honor. With the help of enthusiastic friends and social media, our annual tribute to Steve and the power of kindness has spread around the world.

Give yourself credit for what you've built. No one asks for trauma or tragedy, yet it finds us all. The process of living through the associated grief creates all kinds of character-building opportunities.

We've gained perspective because living with loss clarifies the gift of each new day and helps to prioritize problems.

We've developed empathy for families facing a cancer diagnosis or unexpected death. For parents who lose children and children who lose parents. For single moms and single dads. For children in crisis. We're reminded that many struggles are hidden or unnamed and that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and grace.

We've built layers of resiliency. We have failed one another and asked for forgiveness. We have created huge messes (the great bathroom flood of 2011 comes to mind) and then tamed the chaos. We have cobbled together basic home repair skills. We have been lost but always find our way home.

Life continues. We've discovered new music, authors, movies and restaurants. We've attended weddings and memorial services. We've cuddled newborns. We've traveled across the country and even ventured overseas.

Katie learned to play the violin and then the oboe. Cooper earned the rank of Eagle Scout.

I earned a teaching certificate and now teach middle-school students.

We left our longtime church and found a new congregation closer to home.

Our circle of friends is wider. Our well of memories is deeper. Our passion for life continues. Steve has been gone for 10 years, but I know that he would totally approve.
Tyra Damm is a Briefing columnist. She can be reached at tyradamm@gmail.com.

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10 years without Steve: My journey through life and grief in the decade since my husband died

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It's been 10 years since my husband took his final breath. I have lived with, wrestled with and made tentative peace with grief ever since. My journey through a decade of grief is unlike anyone else's because every single path is unique. There is no lockstep through stages.

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Moral Education is one main key to maturation/growth: Maturation

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Moral Education is one main key to maturation/growth: Maturation

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In the book Atticus, Calpurnia, and other characters surrounding Scout and Jem teach them moral education which is one of the key factors for character development and maturation as the way moral education is taught to young children can effect how they react to certain situations like if they take a violent path to solve a problem like scout did in the begging of the book or if they stay strong and walk away which scout dis later in the book showing her maturation.

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A Brief History of Moral Education, The Return of Character Education, Current Approaches to Moral Education

Only a handful of educational theorists hold the view that if only the adult world would get out of the way, children would ripen into fully realized people. Most thinkers, educational practitioners, and parents acknowledge that children are born helpless and need the care and guidance of adults into their teens and often beyond. More specifically, children need to learn how to live harmoniously in society. Historically, the mission of schools has been to develop in the young both the intellectual and the moral virtues. Concern for the moral virtues, such as honesty, responsibility, and respect for others, is the domain of moral education.

Moral education, then, refers to helping children acquire those virtues or moral habits that will help them individually live good lives and at the same time become productive, contributing members of their communities. In this view, moral education should contribute not only to the students as individuals, but also to the social cohesion of a community. The word moral comes from a Latin root ( mos, moris) and means the code or customs of a people, the social glue that defines how individuals should live together.

A Brief History of Moral Education

Every enduring community has a moral code and it is the responsibility and the concern of its adults to instill this code in the hearts and minds of its young. Since the advent of schooling, adults have expected the schools to contribute positively to the moral education of children. When the first common schools were founded in the New World, moral education was the prime concern. New England Puritans believed the moral code resided in the Bible. Therefore, it was imperative that children be taught to read, thus having access to its grounding wisdom. As early as 1642 the colony of Massachusetts passed a law requiring parents to educate their children. In 1647 the famous Old Deluder Satan Act strengthened the law. Without the ability to read the Scriptures, children would be prey to the snares of Satan.

The colonial period. As common school spread throughout the colonies, the moral education of children was taken for granted. Formal education had a distinctly moral and religion emphasis. Harvard College was founded to prepare clergy for their work. Those men who carved out the United States from the British crown risked their fortunes, their families, and their very lives with their seditious rebellion. Most of them were classically educated in philosophy, theology, and political science, so they had learned that history's great thinkers held democracy in low regard. They knew that democracy contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction and could degenerate into mobocracy with the many preying on the few and with political leaders pandering to the citizenry's hunger for bread and circuses. The founders' writings, particularly those of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John and Abigail Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, are filled with admonitions that their new country make education a high priority. While the early leaders saw economic reasons for more and longer schooling, they were convinced that the form of government they were adopting was, at heart, a moral compact among people.

Nineteenth century. As the young republic took shape, schooling was promoted for both secular and moral reasons. In 1832, a time when some of the Founding Fathers were still alive, Abraham Lincoln wrote, in his first political announcement (March 9,1832), "I desire to see a time when education, and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry, shall become much more general than at present." Horace Mann, the nineteenth-century champion of the common schools, strongly advocated for moral education. He and his followers were worried by the widespread drunkenness, crime, and poverty during the Jacksonian period in which they lived. Of concern, too, were the waves of immigrants flooding into cities, unprepared for urban life and particularly unprepared to participate in democratic civic life. Mann and his supporters saw free public schools as the ethical leaven of society. In 1849, in his twelfth and final report to the Massachusetts Board of Education, he wrote that if children age four to sixteen could experience "the elevating influences of good schools, the dark host of private vices and public crimes, which now embitter domestic peace and stain the civilization of the age, might, in 99 cases in every 100, be banished from the world"(p. 96).

In the nineteenth century, teachers were hired and trained with the clear expectation that they would advance the moral mission of the school and attend to character formation. Literature, biography, and history were taught with the explicit intention of infusing children with high moral standards and good examples to guide their lives. Students' copybook headings offered morally uplifting thoughts: "Quarrelsome persons are always dangerous companions" and "Praise follows exertion." The most successful textbooks during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the famed McGuffey readers, which were filled with moral stories, urgings, and lessons. During this period of our evolution as a nation, moral education was deep in the very fabric of our schools.

There was, however, something else in the fabric of moral education that caused it to become problematic: religion. In the United States, as a group of colonies and later as a new nation, the overwhelming dominant religion was Protestantism. While not as prominent as during the Puritan era, the King James Bible was, nevertheless, a staple of U.S. public schools. The root of the moral code was seen as residing there. However, as waves of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Italy came to the country from the mid-nineteenth century forward, the pan-Protestant tone and orthodoxy of the schools came under scrutiny and a reaction set in. Concerned that their children would be weaned from their faith, Catholics developed their own school system. Later in the twentieth century, other religious groups, such as Jews, Muslims, and even various Protestant denominations, formed their own schools. Each group desired, and continues to desire, that its moral education be rooted in its respective faith or code.

Twentieth century. During this same late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century period, there was also a growing reaction against organized religion and the belief in a spiritual dimension of human existence. Intellectual leaders and writers were deeply influenced by the ideas of the English naturalist Charles Darwin, the German political philosopher Karl Marx, the Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, and the German philosopher and poet Friedrich Nietzsche, and by a growing strict interpretation of the separation of church and state doctrine. This trend increased after World War II and was further intensified by what appeared to be the large cracks in the nation's moral consensus in the late 1960s. Since for so many Americans the strongest roots of moral truths reside in their religious beliefs, educators and others became wary of using the schools for moral education. More and more this was seen to be the province of the family and the church. Some educators became proponents of "value-free" schooling, ignoring the fact that it is impossible to create a school devoid of ethical issues, lessons, and controversies.

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, as many schools attempted to ignore the moral dimension of schooling, three things happened: Achievement scores began to decline, discipline and behavior problems increased, and voices were raised accusing the schools of teaching secular humanism. As the same time, educators were encouraged to address the moral concerns of students using two approaches: values clarification and cognitive developmental moral education.

The first, values clarification, rests on little theory other than the assumption that students need practice choosing among moral alternatives and that teachers should be facilitators of the clarification process rather than indoctrinators of particular moral ideas or value choices. This approach, although widely practiced, came under strong criticism for, among other things, promoting moral relativism among students. While currently few educators confidently advocate values clarification, its residue of teacher neutrality and hesitance to actively address ethical issues and the moral domain persists.

The second approach, cognitive developmental moral education, sprang from the work of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and was further developed by Lawrence Kohlberg. In contrast to values clarification, cognitive moral development is heavy on theory and light on classroom applications. In its most popular form, Kohlberg posited six sequential stages of moral development, which potentially individuals could achieve. Each stage represents a distinctive way an individual thinks about a moral situation or problem. Teachers are encouraged to engage students from an early age and throughout their schooling in discussion of moral issues and dilemmas. In the later years of his life, Kohlberg was urging educators to transform their schools into "just communities," environments within which students' moral stage development would accelerate.

The Return of Character Education

In the early 1980s, amid the widespread concern over students' poor academic achievements and behavior, educators rediscovered the word character. Moral education had a religious tinge, which made many uneasy. Character with its emphasis on forming good habits and eliminating poor habits struck a popular and traditional chord. The word character has a Greek root, coming from the verb "to engrave." Thus character speaks to the active process of making marks or signs (i.e., good habits) on one's person. The early formation of good habits is widely acknowledged to be in the best interests of both the individual and society.

In addition, character formation is recognized as something that parents begin early, but the work is hardly completed when a child goes to school. Implicit in the concept of character is the recognition that adults begin the engraving process of habituation to consideration of others, self-control, and responsibility, then teachers and others contribute to the work, but eventually the young person takes over the engraving or formation of his own character. Clearly, though, with their learning demands and taxing events, children's school years are a prime opportunity for positive and negative (i.e., virtues and vices) character formation.

The impetus and energy behind the return of character education to American schools did not come from within the educational community. It has been fueled, first, by parental desire for orderly schools where standards of behavior and good habits are stressed, and, second, by state and national politicians who responded to these anxious concerns of parents. During his presidency, William Clinton hosted five conferences on character education. President George W. Bush expanded on the programs of the previous administration and made character education a major focus of his educational reform agenda. One of the politically appealing aspects of character education, as opposed to moral education with its religious overtones, is that character education speaks more to the formation of a good citizen. A widely repeated definition (i.e., character education is helping a child to know the good, to desire the good, and to do the good) straddles this issue. For some people the internal focus of character education comfortably can be both religious and civic and for others the focus can be strictly civic, dealing exclusively on the formation of the good citizen.

Current Approaches to Moral Education

The overwhelming percentage of efforts within public education to address the moral domain currently march under the flag of character education. Further, since these conscious efforts at addressing issues of character formation are relatively recent, they are often called character education programs. The term program suggests, however, discrete initiatives that replace an activity or that are added to the school's curriculum (e.g., a new reading program or mathematics program). And, although there are character education programs available, commercially and otherwise, most advocates urge the public schools to take an infusion approach to educating for character.

The infusion approach. In general, an infusion approach to character education aims to restore the formation of students' characters to a central place in schooling. Rather than simply adding on character formation to the other responsibilities of schools, such as numeracy, literacy, career education, health education, and other goals, a focus on good character permeates the entire school experience. In essence, character education joins intellectual development as the overarching goals of the school. Further, character education is seen, not in competition with or ancillary to knowledge- and skill-acquisition goals, but as an important contributor to these goals. To create a healthy learning environment, students need to develop the virtues of responsibility and respect for others. They must eliminate habits of laziness and sloppiness and acquire habits of self-control and diligence. The infusion approach is based on the view that the good habits that contribute to the formation of character in turn contribute directly to the academic goals of schooling.

A mainstay of the infusion approach is the recovery, recasting, or creating of a school's mission statement, one that reflects the priority placed on the development of good character. Such a statement legitimizes the attention of adults and students alike to this educational goal. It tells administrators that teachers and staff should be hired with good character as a criterion; it tells teachers that not only should character be stressed to students but also their own characters are on display; it tells coaches that athletics should be seen through the lens of sportsmanship rather than winning and losing; and it tells students that their efforts and difficulties, their successes and disappointments are all part of a larger process, the formation of their characters.

Critical to the infusion approach is using the curriculum as a source of character education. This is particularly true of the language arts, social studies, and history curricula. The primary focus of these subjects is the study of human beings, real and fictitious. Our great narrative tales carry moral lessons. They convey to the young vivid images of the kinds of people our culture admires and wants them to emulate. These subjects also show them how lives can be wasted, or worse, how people can betray themselves and their communities. Learning about the heroism of former slave Sojourner Truth, who became an evangelist and reformer, and the treachery of Benedict Arnold, the American army officer who betrayed his country to the British, is more than picking up historical information. Encountering these lives fires the student's moral imagination and deepens his understanding of what constitutes a life of character. Other subjects, such as mathematics and science, can teach students the necessity of intellectual honesty. The curricula of our schools not only contain the core knowledge of our culture but also our moral heritage.

In addition to the formal or overt curriculum, schools and classrooms also have a hidden or covert curriculum. A school's rituals, traditions, rules, and procedures have an impact on students' sense of what is right and wrong and what is desired and undesired behavior. So, too, does the school's student culture. What goes on in the lunchroom, the bathrooms, the locker rooms, and on the bus conveys powerful messages to students. This ethos or moral climate of a school is difficult to observe and neatly categorize. Nevertheless, it is the focus of serious attention by educators committed to an infusion approach.

An important element of the infusion approach is the language with which a school community addresses issues of character and the moral domain. Teachers and administrators committed to an infusion approach use the language of virtues and speak of good and poor behavior and of right and wrong. Words such as responsibility, respect, honesty, and perseverance are part of the working vocabulary of adults and students alike.

Other approaches. One of the most popular approaches to character education is service learning. Sometimes called community service, this approach is a conscious effort to give students opportunities, guidance, and practice at being moral actors. Based on the Greek philosopher Aristotle's concept of character formation (e.g., a man becomes virtuous by performing virtuous deeds; brave by doing brave deeds), many schools and school districts have comprehensive programs of service learning. Starting in kindergarten, children are given small chores such as feeding the classroom's gerbil or straightening the desks and chairs. They later move on to tutoring younger students and eventually work up to more demanding service activities in the final years of high school. Typically, these high-school level service-learning activities are off-campus at a home for the blind, a hospital, or a day-care center. Besides placement, the school provides training, guidance, and problem-solving support to students as they encounter problems and difficulties.

In recent years, schools across the country have adopted the virtue (or value) of the month approach, where the entire school community gives particular attention to a quality such as cooperation or kindness. Consideration of the virtue for that particular month is reflected in the curriculum, in special assemblies, in hallway and classroom displays, and in school-home newsletters. Related to this are schoolwide programs, such as no put-downs projects, where attention is focused on the destructive and hurtful effects of sarcasm and insulting language and students are taught to replace put-downs with civil forms of communication.

There are several skill-development and classroom strategies that are often related to character formation. Among the more widespread are teaching mediation and conflict-resolution skills, where students are given direct teaching in how to deal with disagreements and potential fights among fellow students. Many advocates of cooperative learning assert that instructing students using this instructional process has the added benefit of teaching students habits of helping others and forming friendships among students with whom they otherwise would not mix.

Issues and Controversies

The moral education of children is a matter of deep concern to everyone from parents to civic and religious leaders. It is no accident, then, that this subject has been a matter of apprehension and controversy throughout the history of American schools. Issues of morality touch an individual's most fundamental beliefs. Since Americans are by international standards both quite religiously observant and quite religiously diverse, it is not surprising that moral and character education controversies often have a religious source. Particularly after a period when moral education was not on the agenda of most public schools, its return is unsettling to some citizens. Many who are hostile to religion see this renewed interest in moral education as bringing religious perspectives back into the school "through the back door." On the other hand, many religious people are suspicious of its return because they perceive it to be an attempt to undermine their family's religious-based training with a state-sponsored secular humanism. As of the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the renewed attention to this area has been relatively free of controversy.

Contributing to the positive climate is the use of the term character rather than moral. While moral carries religious overtones for many, the word character speaks to good habits and the civic virtues, which hold a community together and allow us to live together in harmony.

A second issue relates to the level of schools and the age of students. The revival of character education in our schools has been evident to a much greater degree in elementary schools. Here schools can concentrate on the moral basics for which there is wide public consensus. The same is true, but to a somewhat lesser degree, for middle and junior high schools. And although there are many positive examples of secondary schools that have implemented broad and effective character education programs, secondary school faculties are hesitant to embrace character education. Part of it is the departmental structures and the time demands of the curriculum; part of it is the age and sophistication of their students; and part of it is that few secondary school teachers believe they have a clear mandate to deal with issues of morality and character.

A third issue relates to the education of teachers. Whereas once teachers in training took philosophy and history of education-courses that introduced them to the American school's traditional involvement with moral and character education-now few states require these courses. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the American schools are seeing the large-scale retirement of career teachers and their replacement with large numbers of new teachers. These young teachers tend to be products of elementary and secondary schools where teachers gave little or no direct attention to moral and character education. In addition, a 1999 study by the Character Education Partnership of half of the nation's teacher education institutions showed that although over 90 percent of the leaders of these programs thought character education ought to be a priority in the preparation of teachers, only 13 percent were satisfied with their institution's efforts.

Evaluation of Moral and Character Education

There are a few character education programs with encouraging evaluation results. The Character Development Project (CDP) has more than 18 years of involvement in several K-6 schools, and in those schools where teachers received staff development and on-site support over 52 percent of the student outcome variables showed significant differences. The Boy Scouts of America developed the Learning For Life Curriculum in the early 1990s for elementary schools. This commercially available, stand-alone curriculum teaches core moral values, such as honesty and responsibility. In a large-scale controlled experiment involving fifty-nine schools, students exposed to the Learning For Life materials showed significant gains on their understanding of the curriculum's core values, but they were also judged by their teachers to have gained greater self-discipline and ability to stay on a task.

Still, evaluation and assessment in character and moral education is best described as a work in progress. The field is held back by the lack of an accepted battery of reliable instruments, a lack of wide agreement on individual or schoolwide outcomes, and by the short-term nature of most of the existent studies. Complicating these limitations is a larger one: the lack of theoretical agreement of what character is. Human character is one of those overarching entities that is the subject of disciples from philosophy to theology, from psychology to sociology. Further, even within these disciplines there are competing and conflicting theories and understandings of the nature of human character. But although the evaluation challenges are daunting, they are dwarfed by the magnitude of the adult community's desire to see that our children possess a moral compass and the good habits basic to sound character.

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Moral Education - A Brief History of Moral Education, The Return of Character Education, Current Approaches to Moral Education

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A Brief History of Moral Education, The Return of Character Education, Current Approaches to Moral Education Only a handful of educational theorists hold the view that if only the adult world would get out of the way, children would ripen into fully realized people.

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How an absent Parental figure can affect a child's behavior: Loss

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How an absent Parental figure can affect a child's behavior: Loss

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In To Kill a Mockingbird we find that Scout and Jem's mother had died prior to the events of the book, and, to give Scout and Jem a motherly figure, Calpurnia, a housekeeper for the Finch's. Because of this, Scout and Jem feel less of a need to look over their shoulder every minute if their getting into trouble, as Calpurnia, being a mortherly figure but not actually their mother, woudnt be as threateningn to them.

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Nicki Fuchs got her first period at her mother's funeral when she was 11. A few days before, on Valentine's Day, her family had found her 34-year-old mom, Rachel, dead with no explanation. At the time, Rachel worked at a veterinary clinic and lived with Nicki's stepdad and Nicki in California. Then suddenly they were burying her and Fuchs was bleeding.

"I had to become a woman that day. That was a pretty painful thing for a very long time, getting that period," Fuchs says. "From February until June, I lied about having a period every month because I was in denial about life. I just shut down."

After her mom's death, Nicki's biological dad gained full custody of her, and she had to move from California, where she had a tight-knit, supportive group of friends who were there when her mother died, to Maryland with her dad. There, she says she had to learn how to live a new life. She felt like her dad and his wife wanted her to forget what had happened.

For two years, she didn't believe her mom was dead. She thought maybe her mom was playing a game or testing her. "Because I was so young, I didn't get to grieve her. I just had to keep living life, go through school, and pretend like everything was okay," says Fuchs. "I can't tell you how many times my stepparents and dad asked, 'how are you not over it?'"

Although grief is a normal human experience that most people adapt to over time, losing a parent when a child is young is a significant stressor that requires extra support, says Dan Wolfson, a clinical psychologist specializing in grief and loss. Wolfson speaks from years of personal and professional experience. His mom died from breast cancer when he was 18, and he's the clinical director of Experience Camps for Grieving Children and a researcher at Columbia University's Center for Complicated Grief.

"Having the loss of a parent disrupts our foundation-our sense of security and safety, having secure attachment, having this parent provide everything that parents provide for us. That all gets blown to pieces when we lose a parent," Wolfson says.

An estimated 1.5 million US children lose one or both parents by the age of 15, comprising about five percent of the population. In younger children, grief often manifests in anxiety. Because children rely on their parents to meet their basic needs, kids who have lost a parent may ask who will pick them up from school or make dinner. They sometimes worry about their surviving parent dying, too.

The death of a parent often leads to other losses, too, such as having to move, switch schools, or live with a different parent, like Fuchs experienced. Because the family's financial situation may change if the deceased parent worked, teens may have to get a job to help support the family or watch younger siblings. If the parents were together at the time of death or maintained a strong bond after ending their relationship, the surviving parent may also be grieving deeply, which can impact their ability to support their children.
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As teens, Wolfson says kids' grief can begin to look more like depression or low self-esteem. Having a parent die at a young age is a life-altering experience that can make them feel different from their peers. Feeling socially isolated can hurt kids' self-esteem, which can put them at risk for anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. Fuchs says that almost 20 years after Rachel's death, she still felt out of place up until recently.

In adolescence, kids also typically become more independent and less affectionate with their parents as they develop their own identities. If a parent dies during this healthy individuation process, their teenager may feel guilty about it.

A 2000 Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines study found that about 1 out of every 5 children who've lost a parent will develop a psychiatric disorder. Childhood bereavement research also suggests that having a parent who died due to suicide, an accident, or another sudden cause may further increase the risk for major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

But Wolfson is quick to emphasize that with the right kinds of support, children and teens can adapt, learn to express their grief in healthy ways, and thrive. A parent's death is going to have psychological and physical impacts on a child, but those impacts can often be overcome with time and help.

"I feel like I've been able to witness for myself and children I've worked with real hardships, real trauma, real challenges. I've been able to see their individual capacity to adapt and overcome and lead fulfilling, positive lives," Wolfson says. "I really believe in human potential to overcome challenges that life throws at us."

After a parent dies, Wolfson says children immediately feel that their world is unsafe, so families need to provide them with structure and assurances that their needs will be met. To help build those structures, Wolfson tells surviving parents and guardians, "don't parent alone." He recommends drawing on community resources, like support groups and camps, such as the Experience Camps where he works. He says that encouraging bereaved children to connect with other kids is one of the best things parents and guardians can do, as well as telling stories about the deceased parent and helping the child build a redefined relationship with them.

As time passes, it's important for children to know that it's okay to say that something sad and hard has happened to them, but they can also go on to have a positive life. In his 2013 book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, journalist Malcolm Gladwell details the work of psychologist Marvin Eisenstadt, who found that from a selection of 573 famous or high-achieving individuals, a quarter had parents who passed away before they were 10. Almost 35 percent had lost parents by the age of 15, and 45 percent by the time they were 20. Wolfson attributes this phenomenon to the power of human resilience.

"I don't think I would say, 'it's a good thing to have your parent die,' but what I would say is that it teaches people from a younger age that I can have shit happen to me, I can have really challenging things happen in my life, and I'm able to deal with that," Wolfson says.

In college, Fuchs says she binge-drank and was obsessed with sex. She dyed her brown hair blonde like Rachel's hair because she felt like she needed to look like her mom so she wouldn't forget her. It wasn't until Fuchs was in graduate school that she says she felt safe enough to process her mother's death.

Yet Fuchs' desire to know what killed her mom led her down a path where she's found fulfillment. As a biology major, she took pharmacology class where she had to write a paper on a drug of her choice, so she looked up her mom's toxicology report and read about the drug combination found in her system. That's how she learned that her mom probably acquired at least one of the drugs from her job at the veterinary clinic. Now a scientist and comedian, Fuchs says Rachel's death sparked two of her greatest passions.

"I don't think I would have become a drug scientist if I wasn't curious about what happened to her," Fuchs says. "I think my job is really cool and what I do everyday and how I make money is really exciting. I don't think I'd be able to do stand-up comedy without having gone that low to want to show people that laughing is the cure for everything."

Fuchs says there are still times when she wishes her mom were alive. Other times, she thinks that if Rachel were here, Fuchs wouldn't be leading the life she has.

In August 2016, Fuchs went on a retreat for women who were 21 or younger when their mothers died. Led by Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss, and a grief counselor, the retreat allowed Fuchs to reflect on losing her mom through writing and sharing exercises and spending time with other women who experienced the same loss. Fuchs says she cried a lot. The retreat showed her that she wasn't alone.

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How the Death of a Parent Affects a Child

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Nicki Fuchs got her first period at her mother's funeral when she was 11. A few days before, on Valentine's Day, her family had found her 34-year-old mom, Rachel, dead with no explanation. At the time, Rachel worked at a veterinary clinic and lived with Nicki's stepdad and Nicki in California.

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Exposure to new places, people, things, or ideas can deepen ones moral understanding: Moral Education

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Exposure to new places, people, things, or ideas can deepen ones moral understanding: Moral Education

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Moral education was taught throughout the book by Atticus, Cal, and Jem and Scouts aunt. An example would be when Calpurnia exposed Jem and Scout to a new environment when she took them to her church which allowed them to learn more about Calpurniaz race and how the people there are like the people at their church making them more accepting and understanding

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You have probably had the experience of hearing a new song and not caring for it much at first, but after hearing it a number of times, you find that you really do enjoy the song and catch yourself humming it when you least expect to.

This phenomenon is one example of the mere exposure effect. Basically, the more you see or hear something, you more you like it. In other words, we tend to like things more when they're familiar to us (even if they're familiar for a goofy reason). In the original demonstration of this effect, Robert Zajonc showed his participants images that they didn't already have extreme reactions to (e.g., foreign words, Chinese characters, or faces of strangers).

These participants were asked to just rate how pleasant the images were. Now, some of the participants were seeing the image for the first time when they rated it, but other participants had already seen the image before. Some people had seen it just one time, some people had seen it a few times, and some people had seen it as many as 25 times. The results were clear: the more they had already been exposed to the image, the more they said they liked it. Over the years, psychologists have shown that this happens for a range of stimuli, including paintings, colors, flavors, and geometric figures. The more times people had been exposed to the stimulus, the more they ended up liking it.

Social Mere Exposure

One of my favorite demonstrations of this effect comes from a 1992 study. The researchers arranged for four different women (of similar appearance) to attend a college class a certain number of times throughout the semester. One of these women didn't actually attend at all, one attended five times, one attended ten times, and the last woman attended fifteen times. These women didn't interact with the students at all; they just sat in on the lecture.

At the end of the semester, the students in the class saw pictures of each of the women and rated them on several scales like physical attractiveness. Despite never having interacted with these women, the students showed a clear mere exposure effect. That is, they evaluated the woman who they had seen 15 times much more positively than the woman they hadn't seen at all.

The Limits of Mere Exposure

An analysis of a ton of mere exposure studies showed that repeated exposure tends to be more effective when there is a delay between seeing the word or picture and the ratings of them, which means it helps to give the multiple exposures time to settle in. In some cases, there was still an effect of the repeated exposure two weeks later!

It also seems to be the case the mere exposure effect doesn't work as strongly with children because kids tend to prefer new and things instead of things that have become familiar.

Subliminal Exposure

What's super interesting is that the mere exposure effect is even stronger when the words or pictures are repeatedly presented subliminally. As you've already learned so far, simply being exposed to something for a while fosters greater liking for whatever has been presented, but when researchers deliberately expose people to a stimulus on a subconscious level, the exposure still fosters greater liking. That is, even if you have no awareness that you've seen something a bunch of times before, you still end up liking it more.

In one experiment, researchers conducted three slightly different versions of the same experiment. In the first version, people were doing an activity on a computer, and a photo of a person (let's call him "Fred") was presented 5 times at a speed of just 4 milliseconds (i.e., people don't notice that they saw a photo). In the second version, everything was the same except the photo that was quickly presented was of a different person (let's call him "Dave"). In the third version, everything seemed the same except there were no photos shown to the participants-quickly or not.

The results reveal the power of subliminal exposure. People tended to like a person more if they had seen his face a few times before-even if they were flashed so quickly that they couldn't even notice the face on the screen. Even more, if these people then had a conversation with the person whose face they had been subliminally exposed to, their interactions went more smoothly than if they hadn't been exposed to that person's face before. That is, when people actually met Fred, they liked him more if they had seen his face flash un-noticeably in the earlier activity (compared to people who saw Dave's face or no faces in the earlier activity).

A Mere Summary

Taken together, we can see a clear case of subliminal influence. As far as the "mere exposure effect" goes, subliminally exposing people to words or pictures can have a surprisingly profound effect on how much they end up liking the words or pictures. It's as though we can become familiar with something even if we have no awareness of seeing it before.

So what do you do with this information? Well I often suggest that it's helpful to stay socially active if you want to form bonds with people. You don't have to be the life of the party or anything, but simply making a point to be around could lead those around you to have a more positive attitude toward you since you've become more familiar. Other research ( which I've covered on the blog before) has even shown the power of mere exposure in making you a more influential person.

In a more marketing-oriented domain, this is why companies pay tons of money to put their logo on stuff. It might seem crazy-am I really going to buy "Pepsi" more if their logo is printed on my baseball tickets? Well, when I'm at the store trying to decide which brand to buy, will I go with the logo that feels more familiar or the one that's less familiar? The gentle cunning of mere exposure wins again!

This article on mere exposure is adapted from an online course that I just launched, The Science of Subliminal Influence, available exclusively on Curious.com. Curious is a neat website where you pay a low monthly subscription to learn about all sort of neat things, ranging from academic topics like psychology to more skill-development topics like art, design, and writing. Check it out!

I've also covered mere exposure in my online course, "Psychology of Attraction and Likability."

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The Mere Exposure Effect | Social Psych Online

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You have probably had the experience of hearing a new song and not caring for it much at first, but after hearing it a number of times, you find that you really do enjoy the song and catch yourself humming it when you least expect to.

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The ability to take the perspective of others when others cannot: Perspective Taking

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The ability to take the perspective of others when others cannot: Perspective Taking

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In To Kill a Mockingbird, there's a common theme of prejudice and judgment upon African Americans as well as those who support them; i.e. the Finch family. near the end of part one on page 117, Mrs Dubose refers to the Finch's in the O.K. Cafe by saying,"Not only a finch waiting on tables, but one in the courthouse lawing for niggers!" Responding to this, Scout stiffens up, and although we don't directly hear her say this, shes internally reacting to this, taking the perspective of a black person, feeling the hatred coming off of Mrs. Dubose.

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The Emotion Machine - Psychology + Self Improvement In the 21st Century

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Psychology + Self Improvement In the 21st Century

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One develops more quickly when handling situations with less violence: Maturation

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One develops more quickly when handling situations with less violence: Maturation

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The image showing the discontinuous development represents scouts maturation because of how she started off as a naïve girl blind to the issues happening around her in Maycomb yet still having a violence reaction to what made her upset bit later in the book she took more thought into what she said and did yet she broke down and depended on violence to fix her problems making her maturation inconsistent

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Moral education is deeply important: Moral Education

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Moral education is deeply important: Moral Education

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This video relates to To Kill a Mockingbird because one of the subjects taught in the book by Atticus and Calpurnia to Jem and Scout was moral education. (I’ll find quote in book in the morning )

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Education without moral education is dangerous (Part 6)

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How the loss of Jem and Scouts mother effect the overall plot of To Kill a Mockingbird: Loss

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How the loss of Jem and Scouts mother effect the overall plot of To Kill a Mockingbird: Loss

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This article can be related to how Jem and Scout may feel about the death of their mother. The book indirectly shows that had grieved in the past, and their lives had forever been changed by this momentous event, proving a major point in the books plot.

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Opinion | Grieving a Parent’s Death at a Young Age: A Loss That Lingers (Published 2019)

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Readers discuss how losing a parent changed their lives and continues to affect them.

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Throughout the plot of part one in To Kill A Mockingbird, we see Scout slowly begin to learn and use Empathy as a means of understanding without the need for others to tell her. This deeply develops and underlying plot point during both parts of the book, as we read Scouts commentary slowly becoming more and more empathetic when certain topics arise such as the Cunningham's and their sorry state.

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Brian H. Smith, PhD is an expert in youth development and has served as a member of Born This Way Foundation's Research Advisory Board and as a Senior Research Scientist at the Committee for Children. Empathy and Kindness
Is empathy the key to more kindness? I'm a member of Born This Way Foundation's Research Advisory Board and part of my work is understanding what science says about how to increase kindness. The bottom line? Empathy matters, but it is not the answer by itself. Sometimes empathy promotes kindness, sometimes it doesn't, and too often empathy simply breaks down and fails to make a difference.

Kindness doesn't require overcoming our natural instincts to be selfish and mean- kindness is an essential part of human nature. And empathy can help us be kind by tuning us in to other people, what they're experiencing and what they need.

Take bullying. It's tempting think more empathy is the solution to bullying, but it's not that simple. It seems strange, but what science shows is that having more empathy doesn't necessarily make people less likely to bully others or more likely to step in when bullying happens. Why not?

First, let's unpack empathy. Basically, empathy means knowing how someone else feels. There's two ways that takes place. Let's say you see someone crying right after someone's been mean to them. Just seeing them can make you feel sad too - and your sadness tells you that's how they're feeling. That's Affective empathy. But you can also see them crying, see what happened and understand how they're feeling without feeling the same way yourself. That's 'Perspective Taking' or Cognitive empathy.

There actually is some difference between how affective empathy and perspective taking impact bullying, though not a lot. Research says affective empathy helps reduce bullying, but only a little and not always. Perspective taking on the other hand? If anything, the evidence tends to go the other way.

Why would people who bully others be better at understanding people? It's because most people bully because they get something out of it. Sure, some people just enjoy being mean. But more often the goal of bullying is to look cool and gain social power and popularity. Which may be why bullying is most common in middle school, just as kids enter adolescence and their lives become hyper-focused on peers.

The sad reality is that too often bullying works by boosting people's social status even if bullying doesn't automatically get you more popularity. You actually need the social insight to pick the right victim (someone without powerful friends, someone other people don't feel too sympathetic for etc.), and you need to bully in a way so people think you're cool rather than a jerk.

So it's a mixed bag - good perspective taking skills can help you understand someone else's pain, but people also need it to get what they want through bullying.

Let's dig a little deeper into the science around kindness and empathy. Here's a basic question: are people naturally good or bad, kind or mean? For a long time, the most common view in our culture was that people are basically selfish and to be caring and kind they needed to somehow overcome their natural instincts.

But Darwin actually said that sympathy was our strongest instinct, not self-interest, and new science proves he was right. Research across neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and other fields has shown that kindness and compassion are what really come naturally to people.

Why have humans successfully outcompeted every other species? Because we're good at making weapons? No! It's because we are the most socially sophisticated species. Our massive brains evolved to help us get along and live successfully in complicated social groups, not for waging war. Prosocial behavior, caring and even empathy are some of the most natural parts of being human, starting from when we're babies.

Ok, so if people are naturally prone to being caring and kind, why doesn't empathy always work? Why is there so much meanness and cruelty? Part of the answer is that there can be a lot of barriers that get in the way of people feeling empathy, and understanding how others feel is sometimes just not enough to get people to be kind.

In my next post I'm going to break down the most common causes of empathic failure and look at what can be done to solve them. I'm also going to talk about how to not only boost kindness through supporting empathy but focus on the importance of directly promoting kindness and compassion- something done so beautifully by Lady Gaga and Born This Way Foundation.

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Is empathy the key to kindness? - Born This Way Foundation

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Brian H. Smith, PhD is an expert in youth development and has served as a member of Born This Way Foundation's Research Advisory Board and as a Senior Research Scientist at the Committee for Children. Empathy and Kindness Is empathy the key to more kindness?

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Encouraging Empathy in the minds of children can greatly increase their overall growth and kindness: Empathy

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Encouraging Empathy in the minds of children can greatly increase their overall growth and kindness: Empathy

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This article relates to how Atticus teaches Jem and Scout to be empathetic without giving them a direct lesson. Like the article, Atticus speaks to Scout and Jem about what they did wrong and why it was wrong when they got in trouble instead of hitting them or screaming at them. Due to him doing this could be a big part of scouts empathetic character development. Scout being the one getting in the most trouble means Atticus speaks to her the most and you can tell that when Atticus talks to her instead of punishing her she changes her ways and thinks twice before doing something bad as well as be more empathetic.

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When it comes to raising empathetic children, the advice to parents typically has to do with talking to them about the feelings of others, encouraging them to imagine how another person feels, and praising them when they display empathetic behavior.

My son asked me last night what I was going to be writing about today. I'd just been reading this...
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But there's one simple tool that gets left out of the conversation. I used it with my own kids, and, though I have yet to see this advice in any article about developing empathy, it lines up with current research and what we know about how humans interact with one another.

I ask my children to look each other in the face.

That's it. It's that simple. To be clear, this technique doesn't replace the other tactics mentioned above for developing empathy, but I've found it to be an incredibly useful tool to keep stashed in my parenting toolbox.

Here's how I've used it:

My son is four years older than my daughter. When they were little and still figuring out the dynamics of their relationship, they naturally got into the occasional skirmish. My son tends to be the more hot-tempered of the two, and there were several times that he either threw something at his little sister or shoved her hard enough that she was hurt. Afterward, still angry, he would retreat into himself, arms crossed, eyes on the floor.

The first time it happened, I disciplined my son in the usual way, by taking him by the hand and explaining to him that what he had done was not okay: we don't hurt people, we must be kind and use our words when we get angry. I may have asked him to sit quietly by himself for a few minutes and think about how he could handle the situation differently in the future.

But then one day, in the midst of a skirmish where he'd lashed out at his sister, I took in the look on my daughter's face. She was crying, less physically hurt than brokenhearted at the idea that her brother would hurt her. I felt her heartbreak in my own heart. Instinctively, I got down on my son's level and looked him in the eyes. "Look at your sister's face. Really look at her." I had confidence in my son's love for his sister. I knew it would hurt him to see her crying and to know he had caused it.

Why this technique works

Studies show that even babies recognize facial expressions and can map the feelings that go along with a person's facial expressions onto their own mental state. This is the beginning of empathy. Humans are evolved to use facial expressions as cues to understand how another person is feeling-it is a foundational piece of how we relate to one another.

I began to plow through chapter books almost as soon as I could read, and I distinctly remember a...
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My son stared at his little sister, her face blotched red and wet with tears, her eyebrows drawn up in dismay, her little shoulders trembling as she cried. He couldn't help but absorb the damage he had done. His anger immediately dissipated, and in a few moments he was hugging her and apologizing. It only took a couple more times doing this before it sunk in with my son that he really did not want to hurt his sister. It hurt him too much.

This tactic isn't only useful for curbing hurtful acts-it's also great for encouraging kindness. My daughter will compliment my son's guitar playing and he'll do his little grateful smile, and I'll point it out to my daughter. Her little chest puffs with pride and happiness to know she gave her big brother a boost. My son will compliment his sister's singing or a drawing she has done, and a proud smile will break out on her face. I'll tell my son, "Look at her face! Look how good you just made her feel!"-and suddenly he is grinning too, as if grinning is contagious. Because it kind of is.

So, keep using all the standard tools for developing empathy in your kids. Talk to them about kindness and why it's good to try to relate to others. But also remember that sometimes, the quickest way to deeply feel what another person is feeling is simply to look them in the face.

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When it comes to raising empathetic children, the advice to parents typically has to do with talking to them about the feelings of others, encouraging them to imagine how another person feels, and praising them when they display empathetic behavior.

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Empathy is key to Maturation: Maturation

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Empathy is key to Maturation: Maturation

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In To Kill a Mockingbird, we see scout maturing due to her shifts in age, although a key part of her maturation process is her empathetic development. We see throughout the book that Scout is constantly being taught lessons of empathy from both Atticus and Calpurnia, and later on in the book, we see Scout being empathetic without the aid of Atticus and Calpurnia. Because of this, she matures as a character and further developed her empathetic abilities.

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Abstract

Empathy, which implies a shared interpersonal experience, is implicated in many aspects of social cognition, notably prosocial behavior, morality and the regulation of aggression. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the current knowledge in developmental and affective neuroscience with an emphasis on the perception of pain in others. It will be argued that human empathy involves several components: affective arousal, emotion understanding and emotion regulation, each with different developmental trajectories. These components are implemented by a complex network of distributed, often recursively connected, interacting neural regions including the superior temporal sulcus, insula, medial and orbitofrontal cortices, amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex, as well as autonomic and neuroendocrine processes implicated in social behaviors and emotional states. Decomposing the construct of empathy into subcomponents that operate in conjunction in the healthy brain and examining their developmental trajectory provides added value to our current approaches to understanding human development. It can also benefit our understanding of both typical and atypical development.

Key Words: Affective neuroscience, Amygdala, Empathy, Theory of mind, Neurodevelopment, Orbitofrontal cortex, Ventromedial prefrontal cortex

Introduction

Among the psychological processes that are the basis for much of social perception and smooth social interaction, empathy plays a key role. Empathy-related responding, including caring and sympathetic concern, is thought to motivate prosocial behavior, inhibit aggression and pave the way to moral reasoning [ Eisenberg and Eggum, 2009]. On the other hand, children suffering from certain developmental disorders such as conduct disorder and disruptive behavior disorders are considered to have little empathy and concern for the feelings and wellbeing of others, as well as a lack of remorse and guilt, all of which are regarded as risk factors in developing hostile, aggressive or even violent behavior [ de Wied et al., 2006].

This paper critically examines our current knowledge about the development of the mechanisms that support the experience of empathy and associated behavioral responses such as sympathy in the human brain. I begin by clarifying some definitional issues of empathy and associated phenomena. Next I address the neurodevelopment of empathy in relation to a model that distinguishes (a) bottom-up processing of affective communication, (b) emotion understanding, (c) top-down reappraisal processing in which the perceiver's motivation, intentions and attitudes moderate the extent of an empathic experience, and (d) an awareness of a self-other differentiation. I argue that studying subcomponents of more complex sociopsychological constructs like empathy can be particularly useful from a neurodevelopmental perspective when only some of its components or precursors may be observable. Developmental studies provide unique opportunities to see how the components of the system interact in ways that are not possible in adults when all the components are fully mature and operational [ de Haan and Gunnar, 2009]. Until quite recently, research on the development of empathy-related responding from a neurobiological level of analysis has been relatively sparse. Integrating this neuroperspective with behavioral work can shed light upon the neurobiological mechanisms underpinning the basic building blocks of empathy and sympathy and their age-related functional changes. Such integration can help us understand the neural processes that underpin prosocial behavior and can also benefit interventions in individuals with atypical development such as antisocial behavior problems.

Clearing Up Definitional Issues

The term empathy is applied to various phenomena which cover a broad spectrum ranging from feelings of concern for other people that create a motivation to help them, experiencing emotions that match another individual's emotions, knowing what the other is thinking or feeling, to blurring the line between self and other [ Hodges and Klein, 2001]. In developmental psychology, empathy is generally defined as an affective response stemming from the understanding of another's emotional state or condition similar to what the other person is feeling or would be expected to feel in the given situation [ Eisenberg et al., 1991]. Very often, empathy and sympathy are conflated. Here, I distinguish between empathy, simply defined as the ability to recognize the emotions and feelings of others with a minimal distinction between self and other, and sympathy, i.e. feelings of concern about the welfare of others. While empathy and sympathy are often confused, the two can be dissociated, and although sympathy may stem from the apprehension of another's emotional state, it does not have to be congruent with the affective state of the other. The experience of empathy can lead to sympathy (which includes an other-oriented motivation) or personal distress, an egoistic motivation to reduce stress by withdrawing from the stressor, thereby decreasing the likelihood of prosocial behavior (table ).

Table 1

The capacity to perceive and respond to the affective states of conspecifics has evolved with the mammalian brain, particularly the thalamocingulate division of the forebrain

Empathy is a construct that can be decomposed into a model that includes bottom-up processing of affective arousal, emotion awareness and understanding, as well as top-down processing in which the perceiver's motivation, memories, intentions, and attitudes influence the extent of an empathic experience

The experience of empathy can lead to sympathy, which refers to feelings of concern for the wellbeing of the other, and includes an other-oriented motivation; or to personal distress, an egoistic motivation to reduce stress by withdrawing from the Stressor

By the age of 12 months, infants begin to comfort victims of distress, and by 14-18 months, children display spontaneous helping behaviors

Partially distinct, yet interacting, neural mechanisms mediate empathy and sympathy. The former relies on affective arousal and emotion understanding underpinned by subcortical circuits including the amygdala and its connections with the insula, anterior cingulate cortex and OFC. The latter is associated with the functioning of the mPFC and vmPFC

Functional MRI studies reveal age-related changes in the patterns of activation and functional connectivity, reflecting a shift from a visceral emotional response critical for the analysis of the affective significance of stimuli and mediated by the amygdala and OFC to a more evaluative function which critically involves the vmPFC

Neurodevelopmental studies provide unique opportunities to explore how the components of empathic responding interact in ways that are not possible in adults

Given the complexity of what encompasses the phenomenological experience of empathy, investigation of its neurobiological underpinnings would be worthless without breaking down this construct into component processes (fig. ). In spite of reports in the popular press that give the appealing, yet wrong, notion that the organization of psychological phenomena maps in a 1:1 fashion into the organization of the underlying neural substrate, in reality, empathy, like other social cognitive processes, draws on a large array of brain structures and systems which are not limited to the cortex but also include subcortical pathways, the autonomic nervous system, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, and endocrine systems that regulate bodily states, emotion and reactivity [ Carter et al., 2009]. Moreover, sympathy (or empathic concern) has multiple antecedents within and across levels of organization, and a comprehensive social neuroscience theory of empathy requires the specification of various causal mechanisms producing some outcome variable (e.g. helping behavior), the moderator variables (e.g. implicit attitudes, ingroup/outgroup processes) that influence the conditions under which each of these mechanisms operate, and the unique consequences resulting from each of them.

Empathy is not unique to humans as many of the physiological mechanisms are shared with other mammalian species. Recognizing and evaluating signals of distress from newborns and infants is of primary importance in parental care for offspring survival and fitness. The thalamocingulate division of the forebrain is believed to have evolved in parallel with social behaviors related to the perception of emotional information involved in securing emotional bonding and social interactions [ MacLean, 1987]. However, humans are special in the sense that high-level cognitive abilities such as executive function, language and theory of mind (ToM) are layered on top of phylogenetically older social and emotional capacities. These evolutionarily newer aspects of information processing expand the range of behaviors that can be driven by empathy (like caring for and helping outgroup members or even individuals from different species).

Recent affective neuroscience research with children and adult participants indicates that the affective, cognitive and regulatory aspects of empathy involve interacting, yet partially nonoverlapping, neural circuits. Furthermore, there is now evidence for age-related changes in these neural circuits which, together with behavioral measures, reflect how brain maturation influences reactions to the distress of others [ Decety and Michalska, 2010].

The Neurodevelopment of Empathy

Empathy typically emerges as the child comes to a greater awareness of the experience of others, during the second and third years of life, and arises in the context of a social interaction. Each of the components of empathy (affective arousal, emotion understanding and emotion regulation) will be considered separately from both developmental and neuroscientific perspectives. These components are indeed dissociable, as documented in studies with neurological patients [ Decety, 2010; Strum et al., 2006], yet mature empathic sensitivity and concern depend on their functional integration in the service of goal-directed social behavior. There is compelling evidence that prosocial behaviors such as altruistic helping emerge early in childhood. Infants as young as 12 months of age begin to comfort victims of distress, and 14- to 18-month-old children display spontaneous, unrewarded helping behaviors [ Warneken and Tomasello, 2009]. In addition, both genetic and environmental factors contribute to the development of empathy and prosociality [ Knafo et al., 2008].

Most scholars agree that empathy includes both cognitive and affective components [ Decety and Jackson, 2004; Eisenberg and Eggum, 2009; Hodges and Klein, 2001] that have different developmental trajectories. Based on both theories and empirical evidence from affective neuroscience and developmental psychology, one may propose a model that includes bottom-up processing of affective sharing and top-down processing in which the perceiver's motivation, intentions and attitudes influence the extent of an empathic experience, and the likelihood of prosocial behavior [ Decety, 2005; Decety and Meyer, 2008]. In that model, a number of distinct and interacting neurocognitive components contribute to the experience of empathy: (1) affective arousal, a bottom-up process in which the amygdala, hypothalamus and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) underlie rapid and prioritized processing of the emotion signal; (2) emotion understanding, which relies on self- and other-awareness and involves the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), ventromedial (vm)PFC and temporoparietal junction (TPJ), and (3) emotion regulation, which depends on executive functions instantiated in the intrinsic corticocortical connections of the OFC, mPFC and dorsolateral (dl)PFC, as well as on connections with subcortical limbic structures implicated in processing emotional information. These networks operate as top-down mediators crucial in regulating emotions and thereby enhancing flexible and appropriate responses.

Affective Arousal

There is ample behavioral evidence demonstrating that the affective component of empathy develops earlier than the cognitive components. Prior to the onset of language, the primary means by which infants can communicate with others in their environment is by reading faces [ Leppanen and Nelson, 2009]. Thus, it is important for an infant not only to discriminate familiar from unfamiliar individuals, but also to derive information about the individual's feelings and intentions, for example, whether the caregiver is pleased or displeased, afraid or angry [ Ludemann and Nelson, 1988]. Affective responsiveness is known to be present at an early age, is involuntary, and relies on mimicry and somatosensorimotor resonance between other and self. For instance, newborns and infants become vigorously distressed shortly after another infant begins to cry [ Dondi et al., 1999]. Discrete facial expressions of emotion have been identified in newborns, including joy, interest, disgust and distress [ Izard, 1982], suggesting that subcomponents of emotional experience and expression are present at birth, and supporting the possibility that these processes are hard-wired in the brain. Human newborns by 10 weeks of age are capable of imitating expression of fear, sadness, and surprise [ Haviland and Lewica, 1987], preparing the individual for later empathic connections through affective interaction with others. This resonance may be partly based on the mirror neuron system (MNS), which - from electroencephalographic (EEG) studies - seems to be already functioning in infants as young as 6 months [ Nyström, 2008]. One fMRI study directly examined the relationship between MNS activity and two distinct indicators of social functioning in typically developing 10-year-olds: empathy and interpersonal competence [ Pfeifer et al., 2008]. Reliable activity in the inferior frontal gyrus was associated with both observation and imitation of emotional expressions. Importantly, activity in this region was significantly and positively correlated with behavioral measures, indexing the empathic behavior of children. But see a critical appraisal of the contribution of the MNS to empathy in Decety [2010].

Together, these findings indicate that, very early on, infants are able to perceive and respond to another's affective state. This automatic emotional resonance between other and self relies on a tight coupling between perceptual processing and emotion-related neural circuits. Infant arousal in response to the affects signaled by others can serve as an instrument for social learning, reinforcing the significance of the social exchange, which then becomes associated with the infant's own emotional experience. Consequently, infants come to experience emotions as shared states and learn to differentiate their own states partly by witnessing the resonant responses that they elicit in others [ Nielsen, 2002].

Emotion Understanding

While the capacity for two people to resonate with each other affectively, prior to any cognitive understanding, is the basis for developing shared emotional meanings, it is not enough for mature empathic understanding. Such an understanding requires the formation of an explicit representation of the feelings of another person as an intentional agent, which necessitates additional computational mechanisms beyond the affect sharing level [ Decety et al., 2008]. The cognitive components that give way to empathic understanding have a more protracted course of development than the affective components, even though many precursors are already in place very early in life.

An experience of emotion is a state of mind the content of which is at once affective (pleasant or unpleasant) and conceptual (a representation of the individual relation to the surrounding world) [ Barrett et al., 2007]. Emotion is also, however, an interpersonal communication system that elicits response from others. Thus, emotions can be viewed both as intrapersonal and interpersonal states, and the construct of empathy entails both such dimensions.

A number of studies have shown that the reliable perception of facial expressions, such as attention to configural rather than featural information in faces and the ability to recognize facial expressions across variations in identity or intensity, are not present until the age of 5-7 months [ Haviland and Lewica, 1987]. Some questions remain as to whether these early reactions represent recognition of emotion in another or simple mimicry, but by 2 years of age, most children use emotion labels for facial expressions and talk about emotion topics [ Gross and Ballif, 1991]. Recent work has documented that even very young children (18-25 months old) can sympathize with a victim even in the absence of overt emotion cues [ Vaish et al., 2009], which suggests that some early form of affective perspective taking that does not rely on emotion contagion or mimicry is present. Regarding the causes and effects of emotion and the cues used in inferring emotion, developmental research has detailed a progression from situation-bound, behavioral explanations of emotion to broader, more mentalistic understandings [ Harris et al., 1981]. As children develop, their emotional inferences contain a more complex and differentiated use of several types of information, such as relational and contextual factors and the goals or beliefs of the target child [ Harris, 1994]. This development appears to be somewhat slower for complex social emotions like pride, shame or embarrassment [ Lewis, 2000]. Development of this understanding proceeds from lack of acknowledgement of multiple emotions in younger children, to acknowledgement of different variables such as emotion valence and emotion intensity [ Carroll and Steward, 1984].

With cognitive empathy, the individual is thought to use perspective-taking processes to imagine or project into the place of the other in order to understand what she/he is feeling. These cognitive aspects of empathy are closely related to processes involved in ToM, executive function and self-regulation. There is growing evidence documenting that executive function and ToM are fundamentally linked in development and their relationship is stable [ Carlson et al., 2004]. Several studies have shown that, by around 4 years of age, children can understand that the emotion a person feels about a given event depends upon that person's perception of the event and their beliefs and desires about it. Notably, a longitudinal study of children aged 47-60 months examined developmental changes in understanding of false belief and emotion, as well as mental-state conversation with friends [ Hughes and Dunn, 1998]. They found that individual differences in understanding of both false belief and emotion were stable over this time period and were significantly related to each other. Emotion recognition continues to develop into later adolescence [ Tonks et al., 2007], and this improves social cognition performance as well.

ToM is layered on top of affective processes and its development depends on the forging of connections between brain circuits for domain-general cognition and circuits specialized for aspects of social understanding. Neuroimaging studies have identified a circumscribed neural network reliably underpinning the understanding of mental states (self and other) that links the mPFC with the posterior superior temporal sulcus at the TPJ [ Brunet et al., 2000]. These regions were activated in children aged 6-11 years while they were listening to sections of a story describing a character's thoughts compared to sections of the same story that described the physical context [ Saxe et al., 2009]. Further, change in response selectivity with age was observed in the right TPJ, which was recruited equally for mental and physical facts about people in younger children, but only for mental facts in older children. Results from a study with 4-year-old children showed that individual differences in EEG alpha activity localized to the dorsal mPFC and the right TPJ were positively associated with children's ToM performance, which suggests that the maturation of the dorsal mPFC and right TPJ is a critical constituent of the explicit ToM development of preschoolers [ Sabbagh et al., 2009]. Support for age-related changes in brain activity associated with metacognition is also provided by an fMRI investigation of ToM in participants whose age ranged between 9 and 16 years [ Moriguchi et al., 2007]. Both children and adolescents demonstrated significant activation in the neural circuits associated with mentalizing tasks, including the TPJ, the temporal poles and mPFC. Furthermore, the authors found a positive correlation between age and degree of activation in the dorsal part of the mPFC. Direct evidence for the implication of these regions in the accurate identification of interpersonal emotional states has recently been documented in a study in which adult participants were requested to rate how they believed target persons felt while talking about autobiographical emotional events [ Zaki et al., 2009].

In sum, the neural circuits implicated in emotion understanding partly overlap with those involved in ToM processing, especially the mPFC and right TPJ, and they still undergo maturation until late adolescence.

Emotion Regulation

The regulation of emotion is the ability to respond to the ongoing demands of experience with a range of emotions in a manner that is socially tolerable and sufficiently flexible to permit spontaneous reactions, including the ability to delay spontaneous reactions as needed [ Fox, 1994]. Difficulty in the ability to regulate emotions can result in deleterious emotional arousal, thereby hindering the ability to socially function adaptively and appropriately.

Developmental changes in emotion regulation are demonstrated as the infant progresses from almost total dependence on caregivers for regulation of emotion states to independent self-regulation of emotions. Early emotion regulation is mainly influenced by innate physiological mechanisms, and around 3 months of age, some voluntary control of arousal is evident, with more purposeful control evident by 12 months when developing motor skills and communication behaviors [ Bell and Wolfe, 2007]. Empathic concern is strongly related to effortful control, with children high in effortful control showing greater empathic concern [ Rothbart et al., 1994], as indicated by a number of developmental studies which reported that individual differences in the tendency to experience sympathy versus personal distress vary as a function of dispositional differences in the abilities of individuals to regulate their emotions. Well-regulated children who have control over their ability to focus and shift attention have been found to be relatively prone to sympathy, regardless of their emotional reactivity. This is because they can modulate their negative vicarious emotion to maintain an optimal level of emotional arousal. In contrast, children who are unable to regulate their emotions, especially if they are dispositionally prone to intense negative emotions, are found to be low in dispositional sympathy and prone to personal distress [ Eisenberg and Eggum, 2009].

Interestingly, the development of emotion regulation is functionally linked to the development of executive functions and metacognition. Indeed, improvement in inhibitory control corresponds with increasing metacognitive capacities [ Zelazo et al., 2004], as well as with maturation of brain regions which underlie working memory and inhibitory control [ Tamm et al., 2002]. The regions of the PFC that are most consistently involved in emotion regulation include the ventral and dorsal aspects of the PFC, as well as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) [ Ochsner et al., 2002]. In primates, these regions comprise a mixture of dysgranular, granular and agranular cortical areas. Ventromedial areas of the PFC develop relatively early and are involved especially in the control of emotional behaviors, whereas lateral prefrontal cortical regions develop late, and are principally involved in higher executive functions [ Philips et al., 2008]. The PFC and its functions follow an extremely protracted developmental course, and age-related changes continue well into adolescence [ Bunge et al., 2002; Casey et al., 2005]. Frontal lobe maturation is associated with an increase in the ability of a child to activate areas involved in emotional control and to exercise inhibitory control over their thoughts, attention and action. The maturation of the PFC also allows children to use verbalizations to achieve self-regulation of their feelings [ Diamond, 2002]. It is therefore likely that different parts of the brain may be differentially involved in empathy at different ages. For example, Killgore and Yurgelun-Todd [2007] provided evidence that as a child matures into adolescence, there is a shift in response to emotional events from using more limbic-related anatomic structures such as the amygdala to using more frontal lobe regions to control emotional responses. Thus, not only may there be less neural activity related to the regulation of cognition and emotion in younger individuals, but the neural pattern itself is likely to differ.

Developmental studies conducted by Lewis et al. [2006] suggest that while young children, like adults, recruit cortical mechanisms of emotion regulation tapped by event-related potentials associated with effortful control and information processing, there are some important age-related changes. In one study with children 5-16 years of age, two event-related potential components associated with inhibitory control: the frontal N2 and frontal P3 were recorded before, during and after a negative emotion induction when engaged in a simple go/no-go procedure in which points for successful performance earned a valued prize. The temporary loss of all points triggered negative emotions, as confirmed by self-report scales. Both the frontal N2 and frontal P3 decreased in amplitude and latency with age, consistent with the hypothesis of increasing cortical efficiency. Amplitudes were also higher following the emotion induction, only in adolescents for the N2, but across the age span for the frontal P3, suggesting different but overlapping profiles of emotion-related control mechanisms. No-go N2 amplitudes were greater than go N2 amplitudes following the emotion induction at all ages, suggesting a consistent effect of negative emotion on mechanisms of response inhibition. No-go P3 amplitudes were also greater than go P3 amplitudes, and they decreased with age, whereas go P3 amplitudes remained low. Finally, source modeling indicated a developmental decline in central-posterior midline activity paralleled by increasing activity in ACC.

Measures of heart rate variability and its variations of respiratory sinus arrhythmia and vagal tone have been linked to emotional reactivity and regulation [ Bell and Wolfe, 2007]. Infants with higher heart rate variability are more emotionally expressive and reactive, and this reactivity produces distress and irritability [ Calkins and Fox, 2002]. As regulatory abilities develop, due to executive functions, the reactivity can lead to concentration when interest is paramount or to more expressive reactivity when other situations take precedent.

To sum up, regulating emotions is crucial in maintaining a connection with ongoing perceptual processes, having access to a greater number of adaptive responses and enhancing flexible and appropriate responses. Emotion regulation develops throughout early childhood and adolescence and parallels the maturation of executive functions. There is evidence indicating that inhibitory processes recruited for emotion regulation involve different prefrontal circuits and autonomic activity as children mature.

Perceiving Other People in Distress

The long history of mammalian evolution has shaped our brains to be sensitive to signs of suffering and distress in one's own offspring [ Haidt and Graham, 2007]. Pain warns of physical threat and danger on the one hand, and also signals an opportunity to care for and heal the person in pain on the other. A growing number of fMRI studies have demonstrated that the same neural circuit that is involved in the experience of physical pain is also involved in the perception or even the imagination of another individual in pain [ Jackson et al., 2006]. This neural network, which includes the supplementary motor area, dorsal ACC, anterior medial cingulate cortex, periaqueductal gray and insula [ Akitsuki and Decety, 2009; Lamm et al., 2007], underpins a physiological mechanism that mobilizes the organism to react, with heightened arousal and attention, to threatening situations [ Decety, 2010].

To examine developmental changes associated with empathy, Decety and Michalska [2010] collected fMRI and behavioral data from a group of 57 participants ranging from 7 to 40 years of age while they were exposed to short video clips depicting people accidentally in pain or intentionally harmed by another individual. Results at the whole-group level showed that attending to painful situations caused by accident was associated with activation of the pain matrix including the anterior medial cingulate cortex, insula, periaqueductal gray and somatosensory cortex. Interestingly, when watching one person intentionally inflicting pain onto another, regions that are consistently engaged in mental state understanding and affective evaluation (mPFC, TPJ and OFC) were also recruited. The younger the participants, the more strongly the amygdala, posterior insula and supplementary motor area were recruited when they watched painful, accidentally caused situations. While participants' subjective ratings of the painful situations decreased with age and were significantly correlated with hemodynamic response in the mPFC, increases in pain ratings were correlated with bilateral amygdala activation (fig. ).

A significant negative correlation between age and degree of activation was found in the posterior insula. In contrast, a positive correlation was found in the anterior portion of the insula. This posterior-to-anterior progression of increasingly complex re-representations in the human insula is thought to provide a foundation for the sequential integration of the individual homeostatic condition with one's sensory environment and motivational condition [ Craig, 2004]. The posterior insula receives inputs from the ventromedial nucleus of the thalamus, which is highly specialized for conveying emotional and homeostatic information such as pain, temperature, hunger, thirst, itch and cardiorespiratory activity. It serves as a primary sensory cortex for each of these distinct interoceptive feelings from the body. The posterior part has been shown to be associated with interoception due to its intimate connections with the amygdala, hypothalamus, ACC and OFC [ Jackson et al., 2006]. It has been proposed that the right anterior insula serves to compute a higher-order metarepresentation of the primary interoceptive activity, which is related to the feeling of pain and its emotional awareness [ Craig, 2003]. In line with evidence that regulatory mechanisms continue into late adolescence and early adulthood, greater signal change with increasing age was found in the prefrontal regions involved in cognitive control and response inhibition, such as the dlPFC and inferior frontal gyrus [ Swick et al., 2008]. Overall, this pattern of age-related change in the amygdala, insula and PFC can be interpreted in terms of the frontalization of inhibitory capacity, hypothesized to provide a greater top-down modulation of activity within more primitive emotion-processing regions [ Yurgelun-Todd, 2007]. Another important age-related change was detected in the vmPFC/OFC: activation in the OFC in response to pain inflicted by another shifted from its medial portion in young participants to the lateral portion in older participants (fig. ).

The medial OFC appears integral to guiding visceral and motor responses, whereas the lateral OFC integrates the external sensory features of a stimulus with its impact on the homeostatic state of the body. The pattern of developmental change in the OFC seems to reflect a gradual shift between the monitoring of somatovisceral responses in young children, mediated by the medial aspect of the OFC, and the executive control of emotion processing implemented by its lateral portion in older participants. These data support the suggestion that the vmPFC contains two feedback-processing systems, consistent with hypotheses derived from anatomical studies [ Hurliman et al., 2005]. One subsystem, situated laterally in the OFC, preferentially processes information from the external environment; the other subsystem, situated medially, preferentially processes interoceptive information such as visceromotor output critical for the analysis of the affective significance of stimuli.

In sum, the behavioral evaluations of others in distress combined with the pattern of brain activation from childhood to adulthood reflect a gradual change from a visceral emotional response critical for the analysis of the affective significance of stimuli to a more evaluative function mediated by different aspects of the vmPFC and its reciprocal connections with the amygdala.

Conclusion

Given the importance of empathy for healthy psychological and social interaction, it is clear that a neurodevelopmental approach to elucidate the computational mechanisms underlying affective reactivity, emotion understanding and regulation is essential to complement traditional behavioral methods and gain a better understanding of how deficits may arise in the context of development. Breaking down empathy and related phenomena into components and examining their neurodevelopment can contribute to a more complete model of interpersonal sensitivity. Likewise, drawing from multiple sources of data can improve our understanding of the nature and causes of empathy deficits in individuals with antisocial behavior disorders. Recent advances in cognitive and affective neuroscience indicate that distinct but interacting brain circuits underpin the different components of empathy, each having their own developmental trajectory.

Humans are born with the neural circuitry that implements core affect (that can be described by hedonic valence and arousal), and binds sensory and somatovisceral information to create a meaningful representation that can be used to safely navigate the world [ Duncan and Barrett, 2007]. Gradually, the ability to apprehend the emotional states of others increases with age in terms of decoding confounded emotions, interpreting situational regulators of affect and understanding 'unexpressed' affect - the intensity of emotional reactions to the affect of others -, and may asymptote at a relatively young age and have a significant biological contribution, particularly relying on reciprocal connections between the vmPFC, ACC and amygdala. Part of the developmental process may consist of acquiring more elaborated empathy/sympathy complex behaviors - more occasions that evoke affect and buffer against such evocation - as well as better distancing, distracting, display and avoidance patterns [ More, 1990]. Empathic emotional response in the young child may be stronger, whereas sympathetic behavior may be less differentiated. With age and increased maturation of the mPFC, dlPFC and vmPFC, in conjunction with input from interpersonal experiences that are strongly modulated by various contextual and social factors such as ingroup versus outgroup processes, children and adolescents become sensitive to social norms regulating prosocial behavior and, accordingly, may become more selective in their response to others.

Developmental affective neuroscience is still a young discipline and much has to be learned beyond the mere correlations between structural, fMRI and developmental trajectories. Future research will greatly benefit from combining advances in imaging technologies (e.g. EEG, fMRI, diffusion tensor imaging, optical imaging), ecologically valid experimental paradigms, measures of hormonal levels, and genetics (too little is known about the impact of individual differences) for a more complete understanding of social cognition and a better grasp of neurodevelopmental disorders.

Acknowledgment

The writing of this paper was supported by a grant (BCS-0718480) from the National Science Foundation and a grant from the NIH/National Institute of Mental Health (MH84934-01A1).

References

Decety J, Michalska KJ. Neurodevelopmental changes in the circuits underlying empathy and sympathy from childhood to adulthood. Dev Sci. 2010 E-pub ahead of print. [[PubMed] Google Scholar]

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The Neurodevelopment of Empathy in Humans

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Empathy, which implies a shared interpersonal experience, is implicated in many aspects of social cognition, notably prosocial behavior, morality and the regulation of aggression. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the current knowledge in developmental and affective neuroscience with an emphasis on the perception of pain in others.

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Atticus's ability to set good examples: Maturation

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Atticus's ability to set good examples: Maturation

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In To kill a Mockingbird, Atticus's example setting is a key plot point for both Scout and Jem's maturation. For example on page 85, we are informed that Atticus defends African Americans, although, in the book, they refer to them with a different word. Atticus then informs Scout not to use that word, and we see throughout the book that Atticus refrains from using that word, setting a good example for his kids. This artical shows how setting a good example for your kids is crucial at all times.

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Children are influenced by the world around them, but your actions and attitudes have the strongest influence on them when it comes to many things, including drinking, smoking or using other drugs. Setting a good example, particularly when it comes to drinking alcohol, helps protect your child from making unhealthy choices as they continue to grow and become more independent.

From the time they're born, children learn how to live in the world by observing and imitating those around them. Remember how easily they picked up expressions, some you wished they hadn't? Your kids learn to process what they see, make choices about what to mimic, and when to engage in certain behaviours by watching the things you do. As children grow up, the actions of others also influence a child's behaviour.

Model How You Want Children to Behave

By making healthy, responsible decisions around substance use, you demonstrate positive behaviour for your child to mimic. This can help them later in life as they grow into teenagers and are faced with things like peer pressure.

Try to provide your kids with good examples to follow when it comes to substance use:

Moderate drinking shows how to have a healthy relationship with alcohol.

Abstaining from drinking shows them that alcohol isn't essential for having fun and enjoying life.

Drinking heavily and often shows them that you try to solve problems in an unhealthy way.

Help Kids Make Good Decisions

Kids grow up and eventually make their own decisions. By helping them learn how to make good decisions you can protect them from picking up bad habits from their friends, or maybe even from other parents or adults. Here are some ways to help your children learn about good decision making processes:

Help them think through the reasons that they might choose to follow an example, or not

Talk through your own decision making process and how you make decisions

Limit options when kids are making simple decisions

Sharpen thinking skills by playing what-if scenario games. For example, "What would you do if you won a hundred dollars?", "Who would you choose to go on vacation with if we could bring someone?"

Encourage slower thinking about decisions so children don't jump at the first thing they see

Practice saying, "Why do I want to do this?"

Talk about the process of decision making. For example:

identify decisions

think of options

evaluate each decisions

choose and check back on how the decision worked

Coach kids through situations. For example, if the scenario is they're invited to party they don't want to go:

decide on the issue - ask why don't they want to go?

get them to suggest options - decline the invitation? go to the party anyway?

talk about each option

help them decide by talking about outcomes and values - what happens if they decline? what happens if they go?

ask about it after the event - whether they chose to go or not, how do they feel about their decision after the party has happened?

Responsible Drinking for Community, Family and Health

Alcohol relaxes a person's heart rate, breathing, and mental processing, and releases feel-good chemicals in the body. Its benefits are largely immediate and personal, but the effects of alcohol on those around you can be harmful and far-reaching.

What does it mean to drink responsibly - in the context of your community? Family? Your own health?

Community

Promote well-being in your community by managing alcohol use in ways that respect the needs and expectations of those around you.

Communities are interconnected networks of relationships. Behaving responsibly means you meet the normal expectations of those connected to you in the community.

Drinking responsibly means drinking in ways that stay in the limits of your community's expectations. While expectations vary from community to community, the emphasis on "responsible use" acknowledges that drinking can cause people to neglect responsibilities.

Everyone is accountable to drink in ways that don't harm others or fail to provide reasonable care for others. Drinking should not damage the very fabric of the social relationships that define community.

Family

Parents have particular responsibilities toward children. Every child has the right to expect that their parent's behaviour is not going to harm, but rather nurture and guide them. If you choose to drink, you have the responsibility to do so in a way that does not hurt your child.

Drinking too much, too often, or in risky ways, sends the message that these behaviours are normal and acceptable for children to adopt when older. Overdoing it also:

prevents from other parental responsibilities

takes away from quality family time

eats up resources better spent on family activities

negatively influences behaviour toward family members

Moderation, on the other hand, provides children with a good model of responsible use.

Health

Drinking too much and too often is bad for your health. It puts you at risk of injuries, heart disease, stroke, and cancer, among other things. The more you drink, the greater the risk.

Moderate drinking may contribute to overall health and well-being and not interfere with your responsibilities. Small amounts of alcohol may even lower the risk of heart disease and stroke in some people 45 years or older. But still, these amounts slightly increase the risk of cancer. There is no physical health benefit for younger people.

Did you know?
By helping kids learn how to make good decisions, you can protect them from picking up bad habits outside the home.
Resources & Links:
HealthLink BC: Helping your Child Avoid Tobacco, Drugs, and Alcohol
HealthLink BC: Healthy Habits for Kids

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Children are influenced by the world around them, but your actions and attitudes have the strongest influence on them when it comes to many things, including drinking, smoking or using other drugs. Setting a good example, particularly when it comes to drinking alcohol, helps protect your child from making unhealthy choices as they continue to grow and become more independent.

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Perspective-taking on others: Perspective Taking

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Perspective-taking on others: Perspective Taking

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In To Kill a Mocking bird perspective-taking is a lesson in the book shown in a few ways one being when Calpurnia  pulled scout into the kitchen after scout judged Walter on the way he ate his food with syrup, Calpurnia told scout "there's some folk who don't eat like us (lee, 32)." and overall telling scout how to look at the perspective of others.

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Empathy can come from unexpected sources: Empathy

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Empathy can come from unexpected sources: Empathy

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In To Kill a Mockingbird, scout and Jem are taught empathetic lessons from Calpurnia, which, in the 1930s, would be seen as a very unexpected source of empathy  as the south was very racially discriminating towards African Americans. This is a major plot point as it provides conflicts for Scout and Jem. Much like the book, todays society deems a certain source very unexpected of empathy, yet these claims prove false in this artical

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Newsela | Video games: Can they make people more empathetic in real life?

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Anna Anthropy, the creator of "Dys4ia," believes that empathy games can offer an initial step into understanding marginalized communities. However, the games are not meant to represent their entire experience.