How, when and why abilities go social: researching children's empathy and prosocial behaviors in context.

Introduction: The current paper undertakes interdisciplinary research on empathy in children by combining insights and methodological tools from the fields of psychology, education and anthropology. The researchers aim to map how children's individual empathic abilities studied on a cognitive level do or do not coincide with their empathic expressions as part of group dynamics in daily life at the classroom level.

Method: We combined qualitative and quantitative methods within three different classrooms at three different schools.

Researching children's individual empathic abilities in the context of their daily lives: the importance of mixed methods.

In social neuroscience, empathy is often approached as an individual ability, whereas researchers in anthropology focus on empathy as a dialectic process between agents. In this perspective paper, we argue that to further elucidate the mechanisms underlying the development of empathy, social neuroscience research should draw on insights and methods from anthropology. First, we discuss neuropsychological studies that investigate empathy in inter-relational contexts.