Existing research concerning empathy development has primarily focused on the role of parents, culture, and education but has overlooked the role of siblings. This current retrospective study investigates the association between the quality of sibling relationships in young adults and their cognitive and affective empathy processes. Cognitive empathy refers to understanding and/or reflecting on another person’s viewpoint, while affective empathy refers to responding in sentiment to another’s emotional response. A total of 205 young adults participated in the study and completed questionnaires examining their sibling relationship quality and empathy. Strong positive relationships were observed between affective empathy and sibling relationship quality, which suggests that siblings may play a unique role in shaping each other’s affective empathy development. Young adults with a sibling who made a positive impact on them had higher sibling relationship quality and affective empathy scores. Additionally, female participants reported higher affective empathy and quality relationship with their siblings than male participants.

This article presents normative information for the Defining Issue Test Version 2 (DIT2) schema scores and most common summary scores based on secondary data from the last 10 years DIT2 database (N = 73740, Mage = 23.11, SD = 7.87, the age range in year = 12–95) maintained by the University of Alabama’s Center for the Study of Ethical Development from 2011 to 2020. More specifically, the study provides (1) norms by education; (2) norms by gender and education; and (3) norms by gender and age for the DIT2. The norms indicate a general but not consistent trend that moral reasoning scores increase by education level. Additionally, the Personal Interest and Maintain Norms scores are higher for males than females for all education levels and age groups while Postconventional, N2, and Type indicator scores are higher for females than males for all education levels and age groups.

The emergence of prosocial tendencies in early childhood is still not well understood and not commonly tested with direct measures. This study investigated predictors of prosocial behavior (i.e., prosocial decision-making and prosocial creativity) in 3-to-5-year-old children and explored the role of demographic factors on empathy and moral behavior. The children completed a series of child-appropriate computerized standardized picture-based tasks to evaluate their creativity, empathy, moral development, prosocial decision-making, and prosocial creativity. Parents completed questionnaires on their children’s prosocial skills and empathy, while researchers used the children’s task performance to determine their prosocial behavior and creativity. Binary and ordinal logistic regression indicated that children’s age, creativity, and cognitive empathy played important roles in prosocial decision-making and prosocial creativity. These elements likely construct the foundation of children’s prosocial behavior. Moral behavior was also important for prosocial decision-making, which was a precondition for prosocial creativity. A developmental pattern was also found for the emergence of empathy and moral behaviors, suggesting that these abilities may mature over time or may be learned as children mature. By focusing on early interventions and evidence-based educational practices, policymakers can support the holistic development of young children and set the foundation for their future well-being and societal contributions.

The Lifespan Sibling Relationship Scale (LSRS) is the most comprehensive self-report questionnaire available to evaluate the quality of sibling relationships based on feelings, behaviors, and opinions across child and adult periods of development. To the best of our knowledge, the psychometric properties of the LSRS have not been assessed or reported in an English-speaking population since this assessment tool was introduced 20 years ago. The current study examined the internal reliability and construct validity of the LSRS with a sample of 370 young adults living in the United States. Results indicated that the original six-factor model of the LSRS is plausible with minor modifications to measure the sibling relationship quality and with its close correlation between factors and scales.