Growing up alongside a sibling with a disability may lead to a greater ability to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings, according to Israeli researchers. 

The findings arise from looking at 1,657 families with twins in Israel.
Among them were 63 sets of twins where one child had a disability and the other did not. 

The team sent questionnaires to this group, and to 404 families with twins developing typically.

The children being studied were 11 years old. They were asked to carry out a computerised task to assess their capacity for "prosocial behaviour", meaning behaving in a positive way to help others.

The children who had a twin with disabilities tended to scored higher on the “cognitive empathy” metric, measuring their ability to perceive and understand the emotions of another person.

The study was supported by the Israel Science Foundation and involved researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Toronto. Theie findings were published in the journal Child Development.

Dr Yonat Rum, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Cambridge, said: “Generally researchers usually look at sibling relationships in the context of disability from the point of view of trying to understand challenges and negative aspects.

“We know that the emotional component of empathy is more genetically influenced than the cognitive aspect. 

“The cognitive aspect is more influenced by environmental factors than the emotional part.

“The need to understand someone that is different from you is really important in such a relationship with a sibling with a disability, but the need to feel similar emotions is not as beneficial or needed in this specific relationship.”

The team plans to continue with the line of research and broaden it to other potential positive effects or settings. 

Dr Rum said: “It might apply to children who have in their classrooms a child with disabilities. We have already planned studies to investigate this question.

“We believe that including a person with disabilities specifically in an educational setting will have positive effects on children that will be his or her classmates.” 

A 2020 Israeli study led by Tel Aviv University and the University of Haifa found higher levels of positive sibling relationships among children with intellectual disabilities.