Here, there and everywhere: emotion and mental state talk in different social contexts predicts empathic helping in toddlers

Abstract

A growing body of literature suggests that parents socialize early-emerging prosocial behavior across varied contexts and in subtle yet powerful ways. We focus on discourse about emotions and mental states as one potential socialization mechanism given its conceptual relevance to prosocial behavior and its known positive relations with emotion understanding and social-cognitive development, as well as parents' frequent use of such discourse beginning in infancy. Specifically, we ask how parents' emotion and mental state talk (EMST) with their toddlers relates to toddlers' helping and how these associations vary by context. Children aged 18- to 30-months (n = 38) interacted with a parent during book reading and joint play with toys, two everyday contexts that afford parental discussion of emotions and mental states. Children also participated in instrumental and empathic helping tasks. Results revealed that although parents discuss mental states with their children in both contexts, the nature of their talk differs: during book reading parents labeled emotions and mental states significantly more often than during joint play, especially simple affect words (e.g., happy, sad) and explanations or elaborations of emotions; whereas they used more desire talk and mental state words (e.g., think, know) in joint play. Parents' emotion and mental state discourse related to children's empathic, emotion-based helping behavior; however, it did not relate to instrumental, action-based helping. Moreover, relations between parent talk and empathic helping varied by context: children who helped more quickly had parents who labeled emotion and mental states more often during joint play and who elicited this talk more often during book reading. As EMST both varies between contexts and exhibits context-specific associations with empathic prosocial behavior early in development, we conclude that such discourse may be a key form of socialization in emerging prosociality.

How to Foster Toddlers' Mental‐State Talk, Emotion Understanding, and Prosocial Behavior: A Conversation‐Based Intervention at Nursery School

“…Furthermore, this enhanced sensitivity was also reflected in increased frequency of prosocial behavior toward peers in everyday situations at nursery school, a conduct which is known to be closely related to both mental-state talk (Drummond, Paul, Waugh, Hammond, & Brownell, 2014) and EU (e.g., Brownell, Svetlova, Anderson, Nichols, & Drummond, 2013;Brownell et al, 2009;Ensor & Hughes, 2005). Nonetheless, this finding is to be interpreted with caution, as the intervention and control groups significantly differed on the pretest measure of empathy.…”

“…Thus, before drawing final conclusions it would be necessary to replicate the research with groups showing no pretest difference on empathy scale. Furthermore, this enhanced sensitivity was also reflected in increased frequency of prosocial behavior toward peers in everyday situations at nursery school, a conduct which is known to be closely related to both mental-state talk (Drummond, Paul, Waugh, Hammond, & Brownell, 2014) and EU (e.g., Brownell, Svetlova, Anderson, Nichols, & Drummond, 2013;Brownell et al, 2009;Ensor & Hughes, 2005). Given that the teacher-guided conversations during the intervention focused not only on emotion knowledge, but also on positive social responses to others' feelings, these findings show the value of stimulating reflection on the emotional states of others and on prosocial ways of alleviating their emotional distress.…”

Parental communication about emotional contexts: Differences across discrete categories of emotion

“…Parents increase their use of mental state language across infancy and early childhood (Beeghly, Bretherton, & Mervis, ). Research examining parent emotion and mental state talk indicates important differences evident in the second year of life that are associated with concurrent (e.g., Drummond, Paul, Waugh, Hammond, & Brownell, ; Hornik & Gunnar, ) and downstream developmental outcomes (e.g., Denham, Zoller, & Couchoud, ; Dunn, Brown, & Beardsall, ). Parent talk about emotion and mental states has been linked with a range of concurrent social skills, such as prosocial behaviors at 18‐ and 30‐months of age (Brownell, Svetlova, Anderson, Nichols, & Drummond, ), 3‐ and 5‐year‐olds emotional competence and theory of mind (LaBounty, Wellman, Olson, Lagattuta, & Liu, ; Racine, Carpendale, & Turnbull, ; Ruffman, Slade, & Crowe, ), and preschoolers' emotional understanding (Garner, Jones, Gaddy, & Rennie, ).…”

The multidimensional nature of early prosocial behavior: a motivational perspective

“…One set of studies found that emotion talk, particularly the elicitation of emotion words [12], was correlated with behavioral assessments of young children's sharing and emotion-based helping, but not with instrumental helping [13]. Further research focused on specific social-cognitive skills and social experiences.…”