This post originally appeared onThe Conversation.

Theyactively take into account others emotionswhen making decisions about how to respond to them.

Does this mean that children feel sympathy for others from an early age?

And is there a way in which parents can teach their children to be sympathetic?

What is Sympathy?

It often accompanies feelings of pity for the distressed other.

Sympathy is different from empathy, which is more of an emotional contagion.

If you feel like crying when you see someone else cry, you are experiencing empathy.

You might even be overwhelmed by that persons distress.

And unlike empathy, sympathy involves some distance.

We start to show concern for others from very early on.

So, their cry might simply be a case of emotional contagion.

Either way, these are early forms of how we show concern.

Later in our lives, theseadvance into more sophisticated sympathyexperiences.

Sympathy goes beyond mere feelings of sadness for others distress.

Rather, itguides our actions.

To understand, we conducteda studyto see how children shared.

In our study, 160 four- and eight-year-old children received six equally attractive stickers.

Children were shown multiple pictures that depicted four different conditions, which included needy recipients and not needy recipients.

The needy recipient was described as,

She/he has no toys, She/he is sad.

And the non-needy or neutral recipient as,

This girl/boy is four/ eight years old, just like you.

What we found was that children tended to share more stickers with a needy recipient.

This is different from simply sharing equal numbers of stickers with peers regardless of each ones personal circumstance.

As children areincreasingly able to use contextual informationthey become more selective about when and how to help others.

Enhancing Sympathy in Children

The question is, could we encourage children to become sympathetic toward others?

And could children learn the best way to help keeping in mind the unique circumstances of others?

The ability to feel concern for others is one of the key characteristics that make us human.

Sympathy binds individuals together and increases cooperation among the members of the society.

This has been observed in developmental research.

Inductive reasoning implies that parents and teachers emphasize the consequences of a childs behavior during a social interaction.

Farrant studied 72 children between ages four and six.

Ju-Hyun Song is a Post Doctoral Fellow, University of Toronto.

Image bySeita(Shutterstock).