We examined the separate influences of volunteers' personal motives and their team leaders' behaviors on volunteer satisfaction and contributions, along with mediating processes suggested by self-determination theory. Participants were 302 volunteers who worked in teams at various sites through a central agency. As predicted, both personal motives for volunteering and transformational leadership influenced volunteer satisfaction through enhanced work meaningfulness and higherquality team relationships. However, motives that predicted volunteer contribution were different from those that predicted satisfaction. Whereas satisfaction was positively associated with motives concerning esteem enhancement and value expression, contribution was positively associated with motives to gain understanding and negatively related to motives pertaining to esteem enhancement and social concerns. Transformational leadership was positively associated with volunteer satisfaction, but not with volunteer contributions. The theoretical ramifications of these findings are discussed, along with practical implications for the recruitment and retention of volunteers.

We propose a novel theoretical and empirical approach to studying group-level social functions of emotions and use it to make new predictions about social consequences of gratitude. Here, we document the witnessing effect: In social groups, emotional expressions are often observed by third-party witnesses—family members, coworkers, friends, and neighbors. Emotional expressions coordinate group living by changing third-party witnesses’ behavior toward first-party emotion expressers and toward second-party people to whom emotion is expressed. In 8 experiments (N = 1,817), we test this for gratitude, hypothesizing that third-party witnesses will be more helpful and affiliative toward a first party who expressed gratitude to a second party, as well as toward the second party, and why. In Experiments 1–3, participants who witnessed a “thank you” in 1 line of text, expressed to someone who previously helped the grateful person, were themselves more helpful toward the grateful person. In Experiment 4, witnesses of gratitude expressed to someone else via video recording subsequently self-disclosed more to the grateful person, and in Experiment 5 wanted to affiliate more with the grateful person and with the person toward whom gratitude was expressed. Experiments 6–8 used within-subjects designs to test hypothesized behavioral and social-perceptual mechanisms for these effects, with videos of real gratitude expressions. Gratitude may help build multiple relationships within a social network directly and simultaneously. By specifying proximal interpersonal mechanisms for reverberating consequences of 1 person’s communicated emotion, the present work advances theory on the group-level functions of emotions.

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Because volunteerism is a planned activity that unfolds over time, people who more frequently focus on the future might also be more likely to initiate volunteerism and sustain it over time. Using longitudinal (Study 1) and experimental (Study 2) paradigms, we investigated whether time perspective, and in particular a person's orientation toward the future, is related to volunteers' beliefs and behavior. In Study 1, a person's dispositional level of future time perspective was closely linked to volunteer beliefs and behavior. In Study 2, people who wrote about the future reported higher intentions to volunteer, and this was particularly true for infrequent volunteers and those with lower levels of dispositional future time perspective. Across two studies, we found evidence that future time perspective, whether a chronic disposition or a pattern of thought elicited by someone else, is linked to volunteer beliefs and behavior.

How does a major natural disaster relate to individuals’ orientation towards society? We collected repeated cross‐sectional surveys before (n = 644) and after the 2010 Chile earthquake (n = 1,389) to examine levels of national identity, prosocial values, helping motivations, and prosocial behaviours in the context of such a calamitous societal event. Our research questions, derived from the literature on helping in times of crisis, considered how natural disasters may implicate identity and prosociality, as well as how identity, prosocial values, and motivations are linked to prosocial action after a disaster. Higher levels of national identity, helping motivations, and disaster‐related helping were found after the earthquake, suggesting that in the aftermath of a disaster, people unite under a common national identity and are motivated to take action related to disaster relief. National identity and prosocial values were closely linked to helping after the earthquake, but specific helping motivations rarely predicted prosocial behaviours. Additionally, proximity to the epicentre was related to higher levels of national identity and participation in reconstruction efforts. These findings contribute to our understanding of people's responses to natural disasters and suggest ways of encouraging prosocial behaviour in the aftermath of unexpected tragic events.