A new study conducted at Hebrew University in Jerusalem suggests children who have siblings with disabilities may be better able to understand others' thoughts and feelings.
Previous research has focused on the stress and challenges accompanied with having a sibling with a developmental delay or disability. This study, published in Child Development, is among the first to shed light on the positive implications of growing up with a sibling with special needs.
Researchers looked at data from the Longitudinal Israeli Study of Twins which included 1,657 Hebrew-speaking families of twins born in 2004-2005. Of these, 63 families were identified where one of the twins had a disability and the other was typically developing.
The typically developing twin siblings of children with disabilities were then contrasted to 404 typically developing twin siblings from the rest of the sample. They were measured on cognitive and emotional empathy and pro-sociality, completed when all children were 11 years old.
Participating children completed a self-report questionnaire to evaluate their cognitive and emotional empathy, and a computerized task designed to assess prosocial behavior. The children's parents also filled out a questionnaire to gauge their children's pro-social behaviors.
The findings revealed that typically developing children who had a twin with disabilities scored higher in self-reported cognitive empathy than did typically developing children who did not have a special-needs twin.
No differences were found in emotional empathy and pro-sociality, however.
Researcher Prof. Ariel Knafo-Noam of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Psychology Department expressed belief that this field is neglected and hopes this study will spark further research.
“These positive effects might be due to the specific 'advantage' of cognitive empathy to better understand their sibling with disabilities and to support the sibling relationship,” he said.