A) Task design. Participants saw 8 emotional scenarios (4 negative and 4 positive) where each trial has an affective empathy phase, followed by a short filler and then a cognitive empathy question and a self-reasoning question. Neutral trials followed the same structure with neutral scenarios. B) Hypotheses (all pre-registered). H1: Affective empathy would engage MPFC and STG, while cognitive empathy would engage DLPFC and TPJ. H2: Negative scenarios should lead to greater engagement of affective empathy brain regions (especially in younger preschoolers) and greater changes in heart rate between set-up and events of the scenarios compared to positive or neutral. H3: Developmental changes, with neural markers of cognitive empathy preceding affective empathy, in line with the foundational cognitive empathy model.

© 2026, BioRender Inc. Icons used in this image are taken from BioRender and are not made available under a CC-BY license.

Brain regions supporting affective empathy (emotional > neutral events) and cognitive empathy (questions on emotional state > questions on neutral facts) and HRF plots.

The images of the brains represent a schematic representation of the channels overlapped on a 5-year-old multilayer head model mesh. Regions are colour-coded as in Figure 4 in (31). The yellow band in the HRF plots represent the time window considered in the GLM analyses.

Brain regions for negatively and positively emotional scenarios and HRF plots.

The images of the brains represent a schematic representation of the channels overlapped on a 5-year-old multilayer head model mesh. Regions are colour-coded as in Figure 4 in (31). The yellow band in the HRF plots represent the time window considered in the GLM analyses.

A) On the left, bar plots of the estimated marginal means of the IBI values per condition and part of the scenario. Error bars indicate +/- 1 SE. On the right, mean values and individual data points of the IBI values per condition and part of the scenario (created using the Raincloud Plots package (79)). B) Scatterplots representing the statistically significant relationships between the IBI difference score (event minus setup) for positive emotional scenarios and betas greater for positive compared to negative emotional relevant events in the left and right MPFC.

A) Scatterplots of the relationship between age as a continuous variable and mean beta values of left STG for affective empathy (both HbO2 and HHb) and right TPJ for cognitive empathy. The black line represents the regression line of best fit. B) Individual beta values of left STG (HbO2) for affective empathy and right TPJ (HbO2) for cognitive empathy across ages. The blue and red lines represent the line of best fit for affective and cognitive empathy. The vertical black lines join the two data points from the same participant.