Head before heart: cognitive empathy emerges before affective empathy in the developing brain

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Public Review

This paper presents an fNIRS neuroimaging study with a relatively large sample of preschool children (aged 3-5) that measures both positive and negative empathy within a single task. Children watch emotional events and are asked questions about both their own emotions and the emotions of others, allowing the authors to distinguish between affective and cognitive empathy. The authors propose "foundational" models of affective and cognitive empathy and argue that their findings support the idea that cognitive empathy emerges before affective empathy in early childhood.

Strengths:

The paper addresses a valuable question by measuring both positive and negative empathy within a single cognitive task. The use of fNIRS with a relatively large preschool sample is commendable, and the pre-registered design strengthens the contribution. The task itself is innovative, well-suited to this age group, and achieves high compliance, which is essential and notably difficult with young children. Overall, the methods are appropriate, and the empirical work is valuable.

Weaknesses:

The main concerns relate to the framing of the paper rather than the empirical work itself.

The introduction contains several claims that are overstated or inaccurate. The statement that "we know very little about the development of this fundamental social skill during the first years of life" does not reflect the state of the field; empathy in early development has been quite extensively studied (e.g., Davidov et al., Malti et al., Uzefovsky et al., Decety et al., Feldman et al., among others). The view that emotional contagion directly develops into affective empathy is based on early theoretical accounts that have since been challenged by empirical evidence (see Davidov et al., 2025). The claim that cognitive empathy does not require theory of mind is also overstated - it is hard to see how theory of mind, the understanding that others have thoughts, beliefs, and emotions that may differ from our own, would not be required for cognitive empathy. Furthermore, the introduction neglects recent and directly relevant work (e.g., Zach et al., 2025; Uzefovsky et al., 2020; Davidov et al., 2021).

Most critically, the claim that "no neuroimaging studies have yet investigated brain regions supporting empathy in preschoolers" is inaccurate. Multiple studies have examined brain regions supporting empathy in children within this age range, including work using fNIRS and studies of positive empathy (e.g., Decety et al., 2018; Light et al., 2009; Levy et al., 2019; Bray et al., 2022; Brink et al., 2011). This is also not the first study to measure brain activation in response to positive and negative emotional events in children (e.g., Cheng et al., 2014; Light et al., 2009). These novelty claims need to be corrected.

The use of "explicit" to describe cognitive empathy and "implicit" or "spontaneous" to describe affective empathy is problematic. Affective empathy can be expressed quite explicitly, through facial expressions, verbal statements, and gestures, and framing it as spontaneous overlooks the motivational dimensions of empathy (e.g., Zaki and colleagues). The authors' use of "foundational affective empathy model" and "foundational cognitive empathy model" as though these are established concepts is not well supported by the current evidence base.

The conclusions in the discussion go beyond what the data can support. The question of whether cognitive or affective empathy emerges first cannot be adequately addressed with a cross-sectional sample aged 3-5, an age at which affective empathy is likely already well established and cognitive empathy is expected to be developing around the lower end of this range. The cross-sectional design further limits what can be inferred about developmental trajectories during a period of substantial individual variability. Together, these issues make the developmental-precedence conclusions difficult to sustain. The claim that the results demonstrate "the first time that this brain specialisation for stimuli of different emotional valence may be rooted in childhood" is also inaccurate, as there is prior evidence for brain specialisation of emotional valence in early childhood (e.g., Grossmann et al., 2007).

Appraisal:

The empirical contribution, the task design, the fNIRS data, and the analyses are sound and have value for the field. However, in its current form, the paper does not achieve what it sets out to do. The novelty claims are undermined by the omission of a substantial body of relevant prior work, and the developmental conclusions are not adequately supported by the cross-sectional design and age range studied. The abstract similarly overstates the support this study provides for the early emergence of cognitive over affective empathy.

Impact:

With appropriate revision, this work could make a meaningful contribution. The task is well-designed for studying empathy in young children and could be useful to other researchers in the field. The fNIRS data from a large preschool sample are a valuable resource. However, the contribution needs to be framed accurately, both in terms of what is genuinely novel relative to the existing literature and in terms of what conclusions the data can and cannot support.

Reviewer #2 (Public review):

Summary:

Authors examined neural substrates for cognitive empathy (conceptually understanding others' emotions) versus affective empathy (automatically sharing others' emotions) development in 3-5-year-old toddlers, and argued that cognitive empathy emerges earlier than affective empathy, challenging the predominant view that affective empathy develops earlier. The authors developed an empathy test for toddlers while measuring their brain activity with fNIRS (particularly in MPFC, STG, DLPFC, and TPJ) and heart rate. They found different brain region activation in cognitive versus affective empathy tasks, as well as age-related changes in the activation of right MPFC and right TPJ.

Strengths:

This work investigated the development of different components of empathy, which is a quite understudied topic. The authors developed an age-appropriate task for toddlers to measure their cognitive empathy and affective empathy, which is likely useful for future research in this field. Their methods are sound, and give a relatively large sample; the results look interesting and relatively solid, except for certain details in the reporting of methods and results.

Weaknesses:

(1) My major concern is the roles of brain regions hypothesized and found in this paper (MPFC, STG, DLPFC, and TPJ) - the authors seemed to have omitted a large portion of the literature on this topic. Prior works have found that these brain regions may be involved in more than one process, or involved in processes that are common to both cognitive and affective empathy (see Schurz et al., 2021). In particular, MPFC seems to be indicated more often in cognitive empathy, and STG may be involved in both cognitive empathy and intermediate processes, which is contradictory to what the author claimed and hypothesized. Relatedly, when the authors made statements like "these results highlight that regions underpinning affective and cognitive empathy in preschoolers largely resemble those documented in adults" (without proper citations), I found it unconvincing due to the disagreements in the past adult research about brain regions related to empathy, which were not quite discussed in the current paper. It may be helpful if the authors do a more thorough literature review and provide a more comprehensive view of how their results fit in the existing literature.

(2) Given the disagreement in the past research about the roles of these brain regions, I feel like the authors' hypotheses may be insufficiently justified, and their claim that cognitive empathy develops earlier than affective empathy is a bit overly strong - would it be possible that these brain regions' different rates/patterns of development are irrelevant to specific components of empathy? Given that behavioral data did not show any age difference, and that each brain region can engage in many functions besides empathy (e.g., generic social and emotional processing), I would be more cautious when interpreting these results.

(3) It would be helpful if the authors report certain parts of their methods and results in more detail.
a) During the cognitive/affective empathy tasks, it is not explicitly clear which part of the fNIRS data were included in the analysis.
b) When the authors did FDR corrections, they should include the q values and adjusted p values. I was also confused about how the FDR correction was conducted - were analyses performed on all 10 ROIs or only the hypothesized regions? I think if the authors have hypotheses about specific regions, they should test their hypotheses first, and then everything else would be exploratory analyses.
c) Additionally, it is unclear what brain template was used and what procedure was followed to map channels of fNIRS data to the template.

References:

Schurz, M., Radua, J., Tholen, M. G., Maliske, L., Margulies, D. S., Mars, R. B., ... & Kanske, P. (2021). Toward a hierarchical model of social cognition: A neuroimaging meta-analysis and integrative review of empathy and theory of mind. Psychological bulletin, 147(3), 293.