Children's low affective perspective-taking ability is associated with low self-initiated pro-sociality.

Knafo, Ariel; Steinberg, Tamar; Goldner, Ira

doi:10.1037/a0021240

Cited by 40 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…First, children as young as 18 months of age show concern (as measured by their facial expression), even if the victim herself displays no emotion after a hurtful act (Vaish, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009). It has been suggested that in these contexts children can sympathize with others through some form of affective perspective-taking based upon situational cues, potentially drawing upon similar experiences in the past (Harris, 2008;Hoffman, 2000;Knafo, Steinberg, & Goldner, 2011;Vaish et al, 2009). Therefore, the current study indicates that children are able to make determinations in the context of goal-directed action, inferring from the situation that the other's goal is not met.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Young children proactively remedy unnoticed accidents

2013

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Human adults will sometimes help without being asked to help, including in situations in which the helpee is oblivious to the problem and thus provides no communicative or behavioral cues that intervention is necessary. Some theoretical models argue that these acts of 'proactive helping' are an important and possibly human-specific form of prosociality. Two experiments examined whether young children proactively help in a situation where an adult did not provide any concurrent behavioral cues that help was needed. Specifically, in Experiment 1 an experimenter either dropped an object without noticing (experimental condition) or on purpose (control). Even though children were bystanders engaged in their own task, they spontaneously intervened by helping instrumentally in the experimental condition in the absence of concurrent behavioral cues from the actor (significantly more often than in the control condition). These acts increased significantly from 21 to 31months of age, probably reflecting children's emerging social-cognitive capacities to represent goal-directed action. Experiment 2 replicated proactive helping in 2-year-olds in a more closely matched comparison in which in both experimental and control conditions the actor did not notice the accident, and children thus had to infer whether help was needed from the actor's previous responses alone. This result shows that children are able to infer a need for intervention on concurrent situational cues, without behavioral or communicative cues by the helpee. These results indicate that proactive prosociality might be a characteristic of early human ontogeny, emerging in children as young as two years of age.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Young children proactively remedy unnoticed accidents

2013

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The average of identification and justification across vignettes formed a composite to indicate overall APT. Previous studies using these vignettes reported inter-rater agreement ranging from .73 to .86 (Anastassiou-Hadjicharalambous & Warden, 2008a;Knafo et al, 2011;Strayer, 1993).…”

Section: Affective Perspective-taking (Apt)mentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Responses for emotion identification that were compatible with the correct emotion were scored 0.5 point (e.g., if the primary emotion depicted was sadness, and a possible secondary emotion was anger, sadness = 1 point, anger = 0.5 point). This scoring was adapted from Knafo, Steinberg, and Goldner (2011), who used this scoring system for a facial recognition task. A coding scheme was developed, and a random sample of 35% of cases was double-coded by an independent rater.…”

Section: Affective Perspective-taking (Apt)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Callous-unemotional traits and empathy deficits: Mediating effects of affective perspective-taking and facial emotion recognition

Lui

Barry

Sacco

2015

Cognition and Emotion

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Although empathy deficits are thought to be associated with callous-unemotional (CU) traits, findings remain equivocal and little is known about what specific abilities may underlie these purported deficits. Affective perspective-taking (APT) and facial emotion recognition may be implicated, given their independent associations with both empathy and CU traits. The current study examined how CU traits relate to cognitive and affective empathy and whether APT and facial emotion recognition mediate these relations. Participants were 103 adolescents (70 males) aged 16-18 attending a residential programme. CU traits were negatively associated with cognitive and affective empathy to a similar degree. The association between CU traits and affective empathy was partially mediated by APT. Results suggest that assessing mechanisms that may underlie empathic deficits, such as perspective-taking, may be important for youth with CU traits and may inform targets of intervention.

show abstract

“…The link between empathy and prosocial behaviors has long been established (Eisenberg and Fabes, 1990; Eisenberg and Miller, 1987), with recent work extending this to animal models (Ben-Ami Bartal et al, 2011; Decety et al, 2016; but see Vasconcelos et al, 2012). Developmentally, the association between empathy and prosociality emerges as early as 3 years in the human lifespan (Knafo et al, 2011) and persists past late adolescence (Carlson et al, 2015). Evidence from neuroimaging studies also converge on the importance of empathic, other-oriented concerns in predicting prosociality (e.g., FeldmanHall et al, 2015; Zaki and Mitchell, 2011).…”

Section: Prosocial Risk Takingmentioning

confidence: 99%

But is helping you worth the risk? Defining Prosocial Risk Taking in adolescence

Kathy

Moreira

Telzer

2017

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

120

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent work has shown that the same neural circuitry that typically underlies risky behaviors also contributes to prosocial behaviors. Despite the striking overlap between two seemingly distinct behavioral patterns, little is known about how risk taking and prosociality interact and inform adolescent decision making. We review literature on adolescent brain development as it pertains to risk taking and prosociality and propose a new area of study, Prosocial Risk Taking, which suggests that adolescents can make risky decisions with the intention of helping other individuals. Given key socialization processes and ongoing neurodevelopmental changes during this time, adolescence may represent a sensitive period for the emergence of Prosocial Risk Taking, especially within a wide variety of social contexts when youth’s increased sensitivity to social evaluation and belonging impacts their behaviors. Prosocial Risk Taking in adolescence is an area of study that has been overlooked in the literature, but could help explain how ontogenetic changes in the adolescent brain may create not only vulnerabilities, but also opportunities for healthy prosocial development.

show abstract

Children's low affective perspective-taking ability is associated with low self-initiated pro-sociality.

Cited by 40 publications

References 20 publications

Young children proactively remedy unnoticed accidents

Young children proactively remedy unnoticed accidents

Callous-unemotional traits and empathy deficits: Mediating effects of affective perspective-taking and facial emotion recognition

But is helping you worth the risk? Defining Prosocial Risk Taking in adolescence

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About