[Self object and interpersonal emotions. Identification of own mirror image, empathy and prosocial behavior in the 2nd year of life].

This paper deals with the development of empathy during the second year of life. Empathy is defined as understanding another person's emotional state by vicariously sharing this state. In contemporary discussion, empathy is not clearly distinguished from emotional contagion, in which the Subject is indistinctly incorporated into the other person's mood. Most authors must therefore stipulate additional cognitive mechanisms, such as perspective taking, or even a theory of mind, to supply the empathic observer with the insight that it is, and remains, another person's emotional state which he shares. Contrary to this notion, the present paper proposes that insight is mediated by the particular quality of the empathical response itself and that self-objectification is the only relevant precondition of empathy, since it allows drawing a clearcut distinction between the emotional domains of self and other. Since self-objectification is also responsible for recognizing oneself in a mirror, empathy should emerge simultaneously with self-recognition. This was tested in an investigation on 36 girls and boys aged 14 to 22 months. In two separate sessions the subjects underwent a "rouge test" for self-recognition and were confronted with a person in need, who demonstrated grief. Empathy was operationalized by prosocial interventions. The study replicates the results of a previous investigation (Bischof-Köhler, 1988, 1991) with a modified empathy-eliciting situation. In both experiments, only those Subjects who recognized themselves tried to help, whereas non-recognizers stayed indifferent.