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ERIC Number: EJ687350
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2004-Feb
Pages: 13
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0961-205X
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Empathy and Observed Anger and Aggression in Five-Year-Olds
Strayer, Janet; Roberts, William
Social Development, v13 n1 p1-13 Feb 2004
In Roberts and Strayer (1996), we reported that emotional expressiveness and anger were important predictors of empathy for school-age children, and that empathy strongly predicted prosocial behaviors aggregated across methods and sources. In this paper, we report how empathy was associated with direct observations of anger and aggression in peer play groups. Twenty-four initially unacquainted five-year-old children (50% girls) were randomly assigned to six same-sex groups; each group met for three one-hour play sessions. Physical and verbal aggression, object struggles and anger were coded from videotapes, as were prosocial and social behaviors. As expected, empathy (aggregated across methods and sources) was negatively associated with aggression and anger, and positively associated with prosocial behaviors. Although children who were more angry were also more aggressive, anger and aggression did not covary across play sessions as a simple causal model requires. These results suggest further directions for research in emotions and aggression.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A