Why Do Some Toddlers Help A Stranger? Origins of Individual Differences in Prosocial Behavior

Abstract

This study investigated the influence of emotion on toddlers' prosocial behavior in instrumental helping tasks with an unfamiliar adult. The goals were to examine whether early prosocial behavior was affected by (1) the adult's expressions of sadness (in contrast to a neutral expression) as a cue of need and (2) toddlers' emotion understanding. Thirty-five 18-to 20-month-olds participated in eight trials in which an experimenter either indicated need for assistance (experimental condition) or did not (control). In addition, the experimenter expressed either sadness or neutral affect in each trial. Toddlers' emotion understanding was assessed using maternal reports of children's emotion words. The experimenter's emotional expression alone was not associated with prosocial behavior, but toddlers helped more in experimental than control conditions. However, toddlers with larger emotion word vocabularies were marginally more prosocial when the experimenter expressed sadness, and girls provided more assistance than boys in experimental conditions. These findings highlight the complex influences of emotion on early prosocial motivation.Correspondence should be sent to Emily K. Newton,

“Aren’t you supposed to be sad?” Infants do not treat a stoic person as an unreliable emoter

“…The current findings are in line with those from Vaish et al (2009) and Newton et al (2014), who demonstrated that infants are willing to subsequently help individuals who displayed neutral facial expressions following a negative scene. Interestingly, our study extends these findings by showing that infants display less concern for “neutral” than sad individuals after a negative event, but are equally willing to help and imitate them and be guided by their emotional expressions, perhaps giving them “the benefit of the doubt”.…”

“…In addition, if infants are sensitive to the valence of emotional expressions, it was hypothesized that they would show less concerned reactions towards a neutral individual following a negative event than towards a sad individual. In line with previous findings (Chiarella & Poulin-Dubois, 2014; Newton et al, 2014), no differences were expected between the sad and neutral group on the imitation task or in the instrumental helping task. However, if infants detected the neutral individual as “unreliable”, then infants in the Neutral group would likely show less empathic helping and emotional referencing than those in the Sad group.…”

“…Given that neutral facial expressions provided no information about the emotion of the person, and that the stimuli in the current study (and those from Vaish et al, 2009) included an emotionally loaded negative event that infants of that age have most likely experienced (e.g., having objects taken away from them), infants appear to be able to consider both their prior experiences with the negative event and the reaction of the emoter. Thus, while infants can detect when the emotions following familiar emotional events are unjustified (Chiarella & Poulin-Dubois, 2013; Chiarella & Poulin-Dubois, 2014), they do not appear to consider the absence of overt emotional cues as incongruent with a negative experience, just as they assume a “positivity attribution” to ambiguous objects (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1999; Cacioppo et al, 1997; 1999; Hornik et al, 1987; Mumme et al, 1996; Newton et al, 2014). …”

“…In addition, only prosocial sharing and instrumental helping were manipulated in the study, so generalization of emotional “inaccuracy” to other tasks is unknown. In a recent study manipulating sad and neutral expressions during instrumental helping tasks, Newton and colleagues (2014) reported that 19-month-olds were equally willing to instrumentally help (i.e., fulfill a goal) individuals who displayed sad or neutral facial expressions. These findings suggest that during an instrumental prosocial act, neutral facial expressions alone are not sufficient for 19-month-olds to be selective in their willingness to engage in goal-oriented prosocial actions.…”

Do Young Children Help to Benefit for Others?

“…Bununla birlikte, yapılan araştırmalar yardım davranışlarındaki cinsiyet farklılıkları açısından tutarsız sonuçlar bildirdiği ve çalışmalar daha çok batı ülkelerinde yapıldığı için (Newton, Goodman ve Thompson, 2014;Svetlova ve arkadaşları, 2010;Warneken ve Tomasello, 2007) bu araştırmada çocukların farklı koşullardaki araçsal yardım etme davranışlarında cinsiyet farklılıklarının görülüp görülmediği de incelenecektir.…”