During which stage of development do children typically begin to recognize…

Concept — Socio-emotional development is mapped onto age-graded stages, and emotional competence is one of its milestones: identifying one’s own feelings, reading another person’s feelings, and responding to them with concern. These components do not arrive together. Affective sharing comes earliest — a baby who cries at another baby’s cry — and rudimentary comforting of a distressed person appears late in the second year. The explicit layer arrives later: naming an emotion in oneself, attributing an emotion to another person as a state distinct from one’s own, and coordinating that understanding with a helpful response. That explicit layer depends on self-awareness and a growing theory of mind.

Application — The question is conjunctive: it asks for the stage at which children begin to recognise emotions in themselves and in others while also showing early signs of empathy. Between roughly two and six years of age children acquire emotion labels for themselves and for others, self-recognition has consolidated, symbolic and pretend play flourishes, and simple false-belief tasks begin to be passed. Over the same span the social world widens beyond the primary caregiver to siblings, playmates and preschool teachers, which gives daily practice at reading other people, and empathic responses become reliably other-oriented — comforting a crying playmate, offering a toy, simple perspective-taking. Explicit emotion recognition and empathy are therefore found together in this span, the early-childhood stage of expanding social interaction.

Cross-check — the neighbouring stages sit on either side of this conjoint milestone:

• Birth to about two, the period of infancy and early emotional bonding: primary emotions are expressed and attachment to caregivers is built. Distress spreads by emotional contagion, and rudimentary comforting can appear near the end of this period, but children are not yet naming emotions in themselves and attributing them to others, so the conjunction the question asks about is not yet in place.

• About six to eleven, the phase of middle childhood and peer adjustment: emotion understanding is already established and is refined into display rules, mixed feelings and deliberate self-regulation inside the peer group — refinement rather than onset.

• About twelve onward, the stage of adolescence with identity formation: perspective-taking widens to abstract, ideological and reciprocal concerns as the young person consolidates a sense of self.

Hence the milestone described in the question — the first recognition of emotions in oneself and in others, together with the earliest signs of empathy — belongs to early childhood, the stage of expanding social interaction. The very earliest affective precursors are present before it, which is why the question asks about recognition and empathy jointly rather than about affective sharing alone.