Empathy Helps Children Understand Sarcasm, New Research Shows: Empathic Kids Detect Sarcasm Better

New research shows that a child's ability to understand sarcasm may be directly linked to their capacity to empathize with others.

The study examined children's empathy skills and found that their ability to adopt the perspective of the speaker also allowed them to understand sarcasm.

The new research was conducted by Penny Pexman of the University of Calgary.

Pexman and her colleagues were curious about why some children were able to understand "sarcastic praise", such as "Thanks a lot!" before other children are. To find out, they studied 31 children between eight and nine years old. The children watched a puppet show that featured sarcastic praise. Then, researchers asked the children whether they viewed the sarcastic puppet as "mean" or "nice."

Overall, the children detected sarcasm roughly half the time. Children with stronger empathy skills were almost twice as accurate as children with relatively weaker empathy skills.

"For children to be able to cope with that they have to learn that you have to essentially ignore the literal meaning of their words and have to get inside the speakers' heads and say, 'What do they really think about this?' To do that seems to require empathy skills," Pexman said.

Parents also filled out a questionarre on their child's level of empathy, asking questions such as, "To what extent is your child visibly upset when he or she sees other people upset?"

Pexman described one video, which involved snowboarding. The puppets wear goggles and there's artificial snow, Pexman said. "There's a jump and one of the puppets snowboards off the jump and lands badly, falling on his face. The other puppet comments, 'That was so good.'"

Sarcasm can be learned in different ways, Pexman said-but being able to recognize emotions seems to be tied to understanding intent, and to sympathizing with others.

"Sarcastic language, especially in unfamiliar forms, is a real challenge for most children," Pexman said in a statement. "Even when children did not recognize a remark as sarcastic, there was evidence in their reactions that the children with stronger empathy skills were sensitive to the speaker's intent."

The new research will be published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.