Toward Generalized Concern: The Development of Compassion and Links to Kind Orientations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Compassion underlies kindness and as such, is important for creating harmonious societies. We examined children and adolescents’ personal experiences of compassion and then how youth with different compassion profiles differed in their kindness (i.e., dispositional sympathy and prosocial behavior). An ethnically diverse sample of 8-, 11-, and 15-year-olds ( N = 32; 66% girls) provided narratives of times they felt compassion. Next, in another diverse sample of 7-, 11-, and 15-year-olds ( N = 168; 49% girls), we assessed youths’ potential for global compassion (i.e., compassion that transcends intergroup boundaries) using a novel interview procedure. We also collected self- and caregiver-reports of dispositional sympathy and prosocial behavior. Youths’ narratives revealed that youth often experienced compassion toward peers and relatives following both physical and psychological sufferance and often mentioned responding to the suffering other with helping behavior. On average, youth reported moderate levels of global compassion (i.e., compassion toward a suffering victimizer) and developmental trends revealed that 15-year-olds reported lower feelings of compassion than 11-year-olds. Next, latent profile analysis showed that compassion-oriented youth (i.e., youth who displayed moderate-high levels of global compassion) were rated as more prosocial than non-compassion-oriented youth (i.e., those who displayed low levels of global compassion). We discuss findings in relation to theory and research on the development of kindness in general and in intergroup contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".