Personality traits and coping with fear of falling: An interpretive description study of older adults in Canada.

Empathy is the ability to understand and share someone else's emotional states while maintaining a clear distinction between self and others (Spinrad & Eisenberg, ). Empathy is crucial for moral development, as it motivates prosocial action and moral reasoning (Batson et al., ; Hoffman, ; Paulus, ). While debates continue about when these capacities first emerge (Paulus et al., ; Roth‐Hanania et al., ), empathic concern and comforting behaviours are clearly observable by age 3 (Dunfield & Kuhlmeier, ; Shoshani, ). The pre‐school period is particularly important for examining empathy because pre‐schoolers, unlike toddlers, demonstrate the self‐other differentiation and emotion regulation capacities necessary for examining individual differences in empathy‐related responses (Eisenberg et al., ; Hoffman, ). These responses vary considerably across children: While adequate self‐other differentiation enables empathic concern (also termed ‘sympathy’; Eisenberg et al., ; Malti et al., ), which motivates prosocial behaviour based on compassion for the victim (Hoffman, ), some children experience egoistic drift, becoming overwhelmed by personal distress and turning attention away from the victim. Pre‐schoolers thus exhibit diverse empathy‐related responses when observing emotional distress, each with distinct cognitive and emotional components (Eisenberg et al., ; Hoffman, ). The present study uses a person‐centred approach to identify distinct empathy‐related response profiles in children aged 3.5 to 6 years and examines how these profiles relate to Theory of Mind (ToM), emotion comprehension, moral self‐concept (MSC), inhibitory control and temperamental surgency. Identifying which factors distinguish children who effectively comfort others from those who become overwhelmed or disengaged has critical implications for supporting early moral development. Hoffman's () theory of empathy development provides a framework for understanding the diverse ways children respond to others' distress. As children construct a separate sense of self and other, their initial empathic distress can transform into empathic concern, that is compassion for the victim that motivates comforting. However, this transformation is not universal: Some children experience empathic over‐arousal, leading to egoistic drift where they become overwhelmed by personal distress and shift attention away from the victim. These individual differences manifest in distinct patterns of cognitive and emotional responses when observing others' distress. The ways in which individuals respond when observing other's emotional distress are characterized by different cognitive and emotional patterns that lead to a diversity of empathy‐related responses. As a cognitive response, hypothesis testing describes attempts to understand the cause of another's emotional distress, ranging from verbal exploration (e.g. ‘Why are you sad?’) to physical approaching and examining the situation (Zahn‐Waxler et al., ). This understanding further supports the ongoing development of distinguishing between one's own emotions and those of others (Decety & Svetlova, ). As children gain knowledge about the causes and correlates of emotions through hypothesis testing, they move beyond egocentric assumptions about what the other person needs, enabling them to display empathic concern more appropriately (Hoffman, ). Hypothesis testing increases with age across the second year of life (Zahn‐Waxler et al., ). Building on this cognitive foundation empathic concern is an other‐oriented affective aspect of empathy (Eisenberg et al., ). Observable indicators include worried facial expressions and concerned vocalizations (e.g. ‘Oh no!’; Zahn‐Waxler et al., ). Empathic concern increases from the toddler through the pre‐school years (Knafo et al., ) and shows individual variation in developmental trajectories through middle childhood (Kienbaum, ; Malti et al., ). Empathic concern motivates comforting behaviours (Paulus, ): When children feel compassion for another's distress, they help alleviate it through physical comfort (e.g. hugs, pats) or verbal reassurance (‘It's okay’). Children engage in intentional comforting, with increasing sophistication and situational appropriateness throughout the pre‐school years (Hoffman, ). Comforting behaviours emerge between ages 1 and 2 (Zahn‐Waxler et al., ), increasing in frequency and variety between ages 2 and 4 (Dunfield & Kuhlmeier, ; Gibhardt et al., ). In contrast to these other‐oriented responses, self‐distress is a self‐focused, aversive reaction, involving primary concern with alleviating one's own negative feelings rather than focusing on the distressed other (Decety & Svetlova, ; Eisenberg & Eggum, ). Observable behaviours include self‐soothing (thumb‐sucking, rocking), displays of fear or anxiety, crying in response to another's distress and freezing or appearing overwhelmed (Zahn‐Waxler et al., ). This response exemplifies Hoffman's () concept of