The Development of Prosocial Emotions

Abstract

Humans rely heavily on their prosocial relationships. We propose that the experience and display of prosocial emotions evolved to regulate such relationships through inhibiting individual selfishness in service of others. Two emotions in particular serve to meet two central requirements for upholding prosociality: gratitude motivates maintenance of ongoing prosocial interactions, and guilt motivates repair of ruptured prosocial interactions. We further propose, and review developmental evidence, that nascent forms of these two emotions serve their respective functions from early in ontogeny. The remarkably early emergence of these prosocial emotions allows even very young children to participate in and benefit from prosociality. We discuss the implications of and challenges to this conclusion and identify pressing future directions for this work.

Comment: Developing and Maintaining High-Quality Relationships via Emotion

“…Though these experiments are with strangers, perhaps children's motivations will be greater toward people they already know and care about, because the risk of losing that support is greatest (which, I note, yields practical benefit for researchers via larger effect sizes). Finally, the paradigms described in Vaish and Hepach (2020) literally repair the damage the child caused, but functional responding flexibly builds on the underlying motivation (e.g., Chang & Algoe, 2019); if guilt is really about relationship repair, experimentally blocking the opportunity to repair the actual damage-the most expedient signal of concern about the other person's welfare-may reveal other outcomes like affiliative gestures or proximity-seeking to repair the relationship with the person, as a substitute to serve the same relationship-specific function.…”

“…The shift in understanding of what triggers gratitude (Algoe et al, 2008) also shifts understanding of its potential social functions: understanding gratitude as a detection and response system for promoting high-quality relationships with people who have demonstrated care for one's welfare has led to predictions about a wide variety of social behavioral outcomes beyond reciprocity among adults (e.g., Bartlett, Condon, Cruz, Baumann, & Desteno, 2012;Jia, Lee, & Tong, 2015;Jia, Tong, & Lee, 2014). Vaish and Hepach (2020) describe an elegant experiment that suggests, for children, gratitude is also about the specific relationship with the benefactor who cares about the child (Vaish, Hepach, & Tomasello, 2018). Going forward, I encourage them to move beyond the potential limitations of narrowly considering that gratitude solves the reciprocity problem, and instead broadly consider that reciprocity is just one tool to help humans solve the having good relationships problem.…”

“…In the target article, we argued that the systematic study of prosocial emotions is a recent but important addition to the broader inquiry into prosociality in early childhood. Two central tenets of our proposal are as follows: (a) early ontogeny provides a unique window through which prosocial emotions can be studied in ways that research with adult subjects does not allow for; (b) some key prosocial emotions emerge during the first 3 years of life, fulfilling their adaptive functions of maintaining and repairing cooperative relationships with nonkin (Vaish & Hepach, 2020). In the following, we respond to the comments by Algoe (2020) and Tsang (2020), which challenged us to further elaborate on those key points.…”

“…Vaish and Hepach (2020) demonstrate the value of both taking a developmental perspective to advance understanding of emotions, and taking an emotion science perspective to illuminate answers to fundamental questions about social behavior that transcend academic disciplines. To the latter point, as they discuss, a wide variety of researchers are interested in the prosocial building blocks of social life and do not acknowledge the role of emotions.…”

Prosocial Repertoire Mediates the Effects of Gratitude on Prosocial Behavior

“…G ratit ude is an impor tant factor in promoting prosociality (for review, see Ma et al, 2017;Vaish & Hepach, 2019). Gratitude is the positive emotion felt when one recognizes that another has given one value (McCullough, et al, 2001), and it promotes a variety of prosocial behaviors, such as helping (Bartlett & DeSteno, 2006;Shoshani et al, 2020), sharing (Beeler-Duden & Vaish, 2020;Chaplin et al, 2019;Shiraki & Igarashi, 2018;Shoshani et al, 2020;Tsang, 2006Tsang, , 2007Tsang & Martin, 2017), and cooperation (DeSteno et al, 2010).…”