ArticlePloS one2019
Lifespan differences in emotional contagion while watching emotion-eliciting videos.
Article in PloS one, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Contagious Crying Revisited: A Cross-Cultural Investigation Into Infant Emotion Contagion Using Infrared Thermal Imaging.Developmental science · 2025Article
- Does affective touch buffer emotional distress? Insights from subjective and physiological indices.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Typical and disrupted brain circuitry for conscious awareness in full-term and preterm infants.Brain communications · 2022Article
- The neurodevelopment of social preferences in early childhood.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Previous research has examined empathic concern by presenting toddlers with a sad stimulus and examining their emotional response, with the conclusion that toddlers display empathy. Yet, such research has failed to include basic control conditions involving some other aversive stimulus such as white noise. Nor has it compared toddlers to adults to examine potential development in empathy. In the present study, we showed toddlers and adults four video types: infant crying, infant laughing, infant babbling, and a neutral infant accompanied by white noise. We then coded happiness and sadness while viewing the videos, and created a difference score (happiness minus sadness), testing 52 toddlers and 61 adults. Whereas adults showed more sadness towards infant crying than any other stimulus, toddlers' response to crying and white noise was similar. Thus, the toddler response to crying was comparable to previous studies (slight sadness), but was no different to white noise and was significantly reduced relative to adults. As such, toddlers' response seemed to be better characterized as a reaction to an aversive stimulus rather than empathy.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.