Abstract: Empathy, as the link of interpersonal emotional connections, is not only an important predictor of moral development, also predict pro-social behavior and moral behavior. And empathy is the core of social relationships, which acts as the foundation of social life. Researchers have found that culture, gender and social situation are the important factors affecting empathy. And more and more researchers examine how early parenting quality and mother-child interaction experience influence on children's empathy, though most of which only had relatively short time-interval and only focused on preschool children. In addition, the notion whether child's developmental outcomes will depend on mother's investment time has been debated for long time in developmental scientists. Therefore, the first aim of the present study was to examine how early maternal mind-mindedness and mother's time affect child empathy-emotion/cognitive/behavior outcomes; The second aim focused on whether mother's time moderate relationship between maternal mind-mindedness in early years and child empathy.
A total of 68 families and their children were involved in this study. We collected data of maternal mind-mindedness at the age of 9 months and 14 months. Mother's total time and engaged time was surveyed at the same age by questionnaires. Families were invited to our laboratory when child was 5 years old. The stranger injury situation observation was addressed to test children's empathy. The findings are as follow:(1) Early maternal mind-mindedness (9 and 14 months) was predictor of children's empathy. Specifically, mother's appropriate interpretation of children's mental states was positively correlated with children's empathy behavior; mother's non-attuned interpretation of children's mental states was positively correlated with children's empathy cognition. However, maternal mind-mindedness in infancy (9 and 14 months) could not impact children's empathy emotion in this study. (2) Early mother's total time was predictor of children's empathy emotion, however, there is no relationship between early mother's engaged time and children's empathy. (3) Early mother's total time did moderate the relationship between maternal mind-mindedness and child empathy. Specifically, for child whose mother spent less time with him/her, mother's appropriate interpretation of children's mental states was positively associated with children's empathy emotion; for children whose mother spent more time with him/her, mother's appropriate interpretation of children's mental states was positively associated with children's empathy cognition. In addition, compared to children whose mother spent less time with, children whose mother spent more time with had better empathy cognitive performance.

Key words: infant, mind-mindedness, mother's total time, empathy, moderation