Children with brothers and sisters are more empathetic, research reveals

Children with brothers and sisters are more likely to be kinder, new research reveals.

Those with siblings that are kind and empathetic are more likely to exhibit those traits themselves, the study showed.

Older and younger siblings have a strong effect on the behaviour of their brothers and sisters.

Researchers from the University of Calgary and the University of Toronto studied a diverse group of 452 Canadian siblings aged between 18 and 48 months.

Scientists wanted to determine if the levels of empathy of children at the start of the study would predict changes in their siblings’ empathy at the end of the study 18 months later.

In order to carry out the experiment, interactions between the siblings were filmed within the family home and mothers filled out questionnaires.

Each child’s empathy was measured on their facial response and reactions to an adult researcher who pretended to be distressed.

The distressed incidents included hitting their knee and catching their finger in a briefcase.

“Although it's assumed that older siblings and parents are the primary socialising influences on younger siblings' development, we found that both younger and older siblings positively contributed to each other's empathy over time,” Doctor Marc Jambon, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto in Canada told the Huffington Post.

“These findings stayed the same, even after taking into consideration each child’s earlier levels of empathy and factors that siblings in a family share - such as parenting practices or the family’s socioeconomic status - that could explain similarities between them,” he continued.

Researchers also analysed whether or not the age and gender of the siblings affected the development of empathy in their brothers and sisters.

“The effects stayed the same for all children in the study with one exception: Younger brothers didn’t contribute to significant changes in older sisters’ empathy,” Dr Jambon said.

The authors of the study said that the next step in the research would be to determine if empathetic tendencies can be cultivated in young children by teaching older and younger siblings to be more empathetic.