Head before heart: cognitive empathy emerges before affective empathy in the developing brain

Empathy is crucial for social interactions across all cultures, and is foundational to establishing social cooperation and group ties in human societies. Challenging the current predominant view, we recently proposed that understanding others emotions (cognitive empathy) might emerge earlier than actually sharing those emotions (affective empathy) (Bulgarelli & Jones, 2023). Here we test this hypothesis by measuring which empathic component matures first during toddlerhood, a critical period for the development of broader social networks. Addressing this question is critical to understand the mechanisms through which caregivers scaffold empathy development. Traditional approaches are inadequate, as they rely on childrens verbal skills or unfamiliar scenarios that lack ecological validity. In this preregistered study, we employed a novel toddler-appropriate task to dissociate neural and physiological correlates of cognitive and affective empathy in N=90 3-to-5-year-olds using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and simultaneous heart rate monitoring to identify internal markers of empathy. We found that brain regions supporting affective and cognitive empathy in young children resemble those observed in adults. Importantly, we showed an effect of age on network specialisation with brain activations of cognitive empathy stronger in younger compared to older preschoolers, and brain activations of affective empathy stronger in older compared to younger preschoolers. These results provide the first evidence that cognitive empathy develops earlier than affective empathy in preschoolers, challenging existing models and suggesting a new framework for understanding the development of empathy. Significance statementEmpathy is a crucial social skill, consisting of an affective component--sharing emotion--and a cognitive component--conceptually understanding emotions. While to date it has been predominately accepted that the affective component develops earlier than the cognitive one, we recently proposed the opposite, which could have important implications for understanding the mechanisms that underpin social skills. Here we successfully developed a new task to dissociate physiological and neural markers of affective and cognitive empathy in N=90 preschoolers. We found that brain activations for cognitive empathy are stronger than for affective empathy in young children. This provide the first direct evidence for the earlier emergence of cognitive empathy, suggesting that scaffolding the understanding of others emotions may be crucial for empathy development.