The mediating role and the emphatic impact of females in conflict management: the investigation of consolation dynamics in pre-school children

The occurrence of ‘consolatory’ behaviours, directed towards distressed individuals or victims of aggression, is a widespread phenomenon throughout the animal kingdom, having been documented in primates, carnivores, proboscideans, rodents and corvids. The capacity to understand and share the emotional states of others, labelled as empathy, is the basis of ‘consolatory’ behaviours. In humans, empathy is involved in numerous social arenas, such as, conflict management, parental care, love affairs and compassion. Recently, neurobiological research revealed significant qualitative and quantitative gender differences in affective and cognitive forms of empathy and in the influence of emotions in the decision making process. Indeed, females appear to be more empathic and more competent in understanding others’ internal states. Moreover, females show a higher propensity to compromise and mediate compared to males. We carried out an ethological study on 137 pre-school children, ranging from 3 to 5 years old, hosted at the kindergarten ‘Florinda’ (Viareggio, Italy). We assessed the occurrence of consolation after an aggressive event in all age-classes under study (3 years old – mean group TCT 46.99% ± 12.36 SE, 4 years old – mean group TCT 52.64% ± 13.60 SE, 5 years old – mean group TCT 62.75% ± 16.64 SE). The consolatory behaviour is used to evaluate if a difference in empathic and mediation abilities exist between males and females. Moreover, since some studies suggested that as children get older their empathic propensity acquire more cognitive elements, we investigated if gender difference in this propensity is also linked to age by delineating possible ontogenetic trajectories of this capacity in human primates.