Abstract: Empathy refers to the propensity to “share and understand others feelings during social interaction”. Preschool years are considered as the beginning of social interactions among children, a critical period for empathy development. However, for this period it was lacking in valid measurement methods. The purpose of this study was to develop a suitable measurement method for empathy of preschool children and investigate its different components.In Study 1 (Experiment 1), the Griffith Empathy Measure (GEM) was revised by changing the parent-report format to teacher-report, and the revised version was applied to a sample of 207 children. An exploratory factor analysis showed that, the revised GEM consisted of 3 individual components named affective, cognitive and behavioral components respectively, each accounting for 4254%, 10. 12% and 691% of variance. The cronbach alphas were 092 for the full scale, and 092, 085 and 081 for affective, cognitive and behavioral subscales, therefore the reliability of the study was good. In Experiment 2a of Study 2, the structure of GEM revised in Experiment 1 was verified and the characteristics of the three empathy components were investigated. A confirmatory factor analysis indicated that, the three-factor model had better fitting results than the conventional two-factor model. Comparison by age showed that, the three individual components exhibited different characteristics. Specifically, affective empathy almost matured by preschool age, and the critical period for the development of behavioral empathy was at the age of 3 and 4, but cognitive empathy would not start developing rapidly until the age of 4 and 5. In Experiment 2b, the spontaneous empathic responses of 39 children in natural situations were investigated by emotion simulation procedure. The correlation between the revised GEM and spontaneous empathic responsive behaviors were different among the three components.In summary, the current findings suggested that GEM was a suitable measure for assessing empathy characteristic for preschoolers. The affective, behavioral and cognitive components were closely linked with spontaneous responses to others distress and sequentially developed during preschool years.

Key words: Griffith Empathy Measure, empathy, preschool children