This research program explored links among prosocial motives, empathy, and helping behavior. Preliminary work found significant relations among components of self-reported empathy and personality (N = 223). In Study 1, the authors examined the generality of prosocial behavior across situations and group memberships of victims (N = 622). In Study 2, empathic focus and the victim's outgroup status were experimentally manipulated (N = 87). Study 3 (N = 245) replicated and extended Study 2 by collecting measures of prosocial emotions before helping. In Study 4 (N = 244), empathic focus and cost of helping as predictors of helping behavior were experimentally manipulated. Overall, prosocial motivation is linked to (a) Agreeableness as a dimension of personality, (b) proximal prosocial cognition and motives, and (c) helping behavior across a range of situations and victims. In persons low in prosocial motivation, when costs of helping are high, efforts to induce empathy situationally can undermine prosocial behavior.

Children show increasing control of emotions and behavior during their early years. Our studies suggest a shift in control from the brain's orienting network in infancy to the executive network by the age of 3–4 years. Our longitudinal study indicates that orienting influences both positive and negative affect, as measured by parent report in infancy. At 3–4 years of age, the dominant control of affect rests in a frontal brain network that involves the anterior cingulate gyrus. Connectivity of brain structures also changes from infancy to toddlerhood. Early connectivity of parietal and frontal areas is important in orienting; later connectivity involves midfrontal and anterior cingulate areas related to executive attention and self-regulation.

No abstract

We examined the influence of a common allelic variation in the dopamine receptor D4 (DRD4) gene and caregiver quality on temperament in early childhood. Children 18-21 months of age were genotyped for the DRD4 48 base pair tandem repeat polymorphism, which has been implicated in the development of attention, sensation seeking, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The children also interacted with their caregiver for 10 min in a laboratory setting, and these videotaped interactions were coded for parenting quality using an observational rating procedure. The presence of the DRD4 7-repeat allele was associated with differences in the influence of parenting on a measure of temperamental sensation seeking constructed from caregiver reports on children's activity level, impulsivity, and high-intensity pleasure. Children with the 7-repeat allele were influenced by parenting quality, with lower quality parenting associated with higher levels of sensation seeking; children without the 7-repeat allele were uninfluenced by parenting quality. Differences between alleles were not related to the child's self-regulation as assessed by the effortful control measure. Previous studies have indicated that the 7-repeat allele is under positive selective pressure, and our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the DRD4 7-repeat allele increased children's sensitivity to environmental factors such as parenting. This study shows that genes influence the relation between parenting and temperament in ways that are important to normal development and psychopathology.

ABSTRACT— Young children’s increasing ability to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and behavior is a hallmark of development that is of critical importance to their socialization. Recent advances in neuroimaging and molecular genetics hold promise for drawing together different levels of analysis of the emergence and growth of self‐regulation. In this article, we review research relevant to our approach to understanding self‐regulation, beginning with an examination of the temperament construct of Effortful Control (EC). We trace the development of EC and its links to an anatomically defined attentional network and identify genes that may contribute to individual differences in the efficiency of this network. We also report on how intervention may influence a central component of self‐regulation, the executive attention network. Although much more work remains to be done, we believe that the importance of the questions addressed and the recent progress in understanding self‐regulation make this a very exciting area of research.