Child Development, May/June 2002, Volume 73, Number 3, Pages 893–915 The Relations of Parental Warmth and Positive Expressiveness to Children’s Empathy-Related Responding and Social Functioning: A Longitudinal Study Qing Zhou, Nancy Eisenberg, Sandra H. Losoya, Richard A. Fabes, Mark Reiser, Ivanna K. Guthrie, Bridget C. Murphy, Amanda J. Cumberland, and Stephanie A. Shepard This study examined the concurrent and cross-time relations of parental observed warmth and positive expres- sivity to children’s situational facial and self-reported empathic responding, social competence, and externaliz- ing problems in a sample of 180 elementary school children. Data was collected when the children were in sec- ond to fifth grades (age: M = 112.8 months), and again 2 years later. Cross-sectional and longitudinal structural equation models supported the hypothesis that parents’ (mostly mothers’) positive expressivity mediated the relation between parental warmth and children’s empathy, and children’s empathy mediated the relation be- tween parental positive expressivity and children’s social functioning. These relations persisted after control- ling for prior levels of parenting and child characteristics. Moreover, concurrent and cross-time consistencies were found on measures of parenting, children’s situational empathic responding, and social functioning. INTRODUCTION Empathy has long been hypothesized to be a crucial contributor to interpersonal sensitivity and social com- petence. Although empathy has been defined in vari- ous ways, one representative definition is “an affec- tive reaction that stems from the apprehension or comprehension of another’s emotional state or condi- tion, and that is identical or very similar to what the other person is feeling or would be expected to feel” (Eisenberg & Fabes, 1998, p. 702). For instance, if an ob- server sees another person who is sad and in response feels sad, that individual is experiencing empathy. There are two emotional responses that are related to, but distinct from, empathy (at least at a conceptual level)—sympathy and personal distress. Sympathy is defined as an other-oriented emotional response that is based on the apprehension of another’s negative emotional state or condition; it involves feelings of concern and the desire to alleviate the other’s nega- tive emotion (Eisenberg et al., 1994). Personal distress involves a negative reaction such as anxiety or dis- comfort upon perceiving cues related to another’s distress (Batson, 1991); it is particularly likely to occur when vicariously induced arousal is high and unreg- ulated (Eisenberg et al., 1994). Because both sympa- thy and personal distress may stem primarily from empathy or empathic arousal, it is difficult to differ- entiate these three constructs in empirical research. Because the measures of empathic responding used in the present study—facial and self-reports in reac- tion to evocative slides—are more likely to tap partic- ipating children’s global empathy than sympathy or personal distress, the term “empathy” is used to label the core construct of this article. When defined as an affective response, empathy and its related forms of responding (e.g., sympathy) have been linked conceptually to individuals’ moral development (Hoffman, 1990), altruistic and prosocial behavior (Batson, 1998; Eisenberg & Fabes, 1998), so- cial competence (Eisenberg, Fabes, Murphy, et al., 1996; Saarni, 1990), and low levels of externalizing problems (Miller & Eisenberg, 1988). However, rela- tively little is known about the factors that influence the development of empathy and how it contributes to individual differences in social functioning. Although there is evidence that some of the indi- vidual variation in empathy-related responding is due to genetic factors (Emde et al., 1992; Zahn-Waxler, Robinson, & Emde, 1992), children’s experiences in the home and other social settings may influence their emotional reactions to others (see Plomin et al., 1993). Although parents’ socialization practices may partly reflect parents’ genetic makeup (which is passed on to offspring), children’s observations of, and interactions with, parents likely contribute to individual differ- ences in empathy-related responding above and be- yond those due to heredity (Eisenberg & Fabes, 1998). The purpose of the present study was to examine the concurrent and cross-time relations of parents’ (mostly mothers’) warmth and emotion-related socialization practices with children’s situational empathic respond- ing, social competence, and externalizing problem be- © 2002 by the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. All rights reserved. 0009-3920/2002/7303-0016