Getting to the heart of childhood empathy: Relations with shyness and respiratory sinus arrhythmia

Although prior studies have found that shyness and empathy are inversely related and that well-regulated children tend to express empathic behaviors more often, little work has assessed combinations of these factors in predicting affective and cognitive empathy in early childhood. The authors examined relations among shyness, resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), and observed affective and cognitive empathy in a sample of 130 typically …