The Development of Empathy, Guilt, and Internalization of Distress

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Abstract
This chapter opens with a review of updates in the field of developmental psychopathology and the role of emotion in adaptive and maladaptive developmental processes. Dysfunctions identified through psychopathology involve disconnections among the three components of emotion—experience, expression, and regulation. The next section introduces the concept of basic and higher-order emotions and presents the findings of recent research on basic emotions in infants, children, and adolescents. The book then focuses on the higher-order emotions of empathy and guilt by first presenting the origins and early development of these moral emotions and behaviors. Next, constitutional and environmental factors that influence the expression of these emotions are identified, followed by gender differences in the prosocial and reparative behaviors engendered by feelings of empathy and guilt. The remainder of this chapter explores the meaning of these differences in more detail and conclusions and implications for future research are also provided.

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