Prosocial Behavior and Depression: a Case for Developmental Gender Differences

Abstract

Purpose of Review Prosocial behavior and depression are related constructs that both increase during adolescence and display gender-specific effects. The current review surveys literature examining the association between depressive symptoms and prosociality, measured with behavioral economic paradigms, across development and proposes a theoretical model explaining a mechanism through which adolescent girls have higher risk for depression than boys. Recent Findings Relative to healthy controls, prosocial behavior is reduced in adults with major depressive disorder (MDD) but may be increased in adolescents with MDD. The relationship between non-clinical levels of depressive symptoms and prosocial behavior remains to be studied experimentally; however, self-reported prosocial behavior is negatively associated with depressive symptoms in non-clinical adolescents, which may suggest a shift in the relation of prosocial behavior and depressive symptoms across the non-clinical (i.e., negative) to clinical range (i.e., positive). Summary The effect of gender on these developmental and clinical status shifts has not been studied but could have important implications for understanding the emergence of higher rates of depression in girls than boys during adolescence. We propose that girls are at heightened risk for depression due to higher social-evaluative concern and other-oriented prosocial motivation that emphasize the needs of others over the self, leading to more altruistic prosocial behavior (despite personal cost) and a higher burden that enables depressive symptoms.

Getting less than their fair share: Maltreated youth are hyper‐cooperative yet vulnerable to exploitation in a public goods game

“…In the trust game, a trustor can allocate resources to a trustee. Subsequently, these resources are augmented by a given factor and finally the trustee must decide how many resources to return to the trustor (Alarcón & Forbes, ) . Most importantly for the present purposes, a recent study using multiple trials of a single‐shot trust game found that postinstitutionalized, adopted youth displayed lower rates and maintained less sharing behavior after they interacted with nonreciprocating peers, compared to never‐institutionalized, nonadopted controls (Pitula, Wenner, Gunnar, & Thomas, ).…”

“…Thus, institutionalization and/ or adoption may engender a distinct pattern of social behavior (e.g., involving limited social reciprocity) that is not typically linked with maltreatment without placement in foster care or adoption (see Zeanah & Gleason, ). Furthermore, while a single‐shot trust game accurately estimates a disposition to trust in a dyadic context (Alarcón & Forbes, ), it cannot account for key aspects of more advanced group‐level cooperation over multiple trials (e.g., higher motivation to cooperate; Axelrod, ; Blake, Rand, Tingley, & Warneken, ). In the present research, we therefore implemented an iterative group‐level PGG to capture effects of maltreatment on cooperative behavior across multiple interactions with the same coplayers.…”

“…Prior studies on adults with disruptive behavior symptoms consistently document attenuated levels of cooperative behavior compared to healthy controls using PDs (Mokros et al., ; Montañés, de Lucas, & Rodríguez, ). For adults with internalizing problems (e.g., depression), studies have yielded mixed findings regarding their cooperative behavior in PGGs and PDs (for an overview see Alarcón & Forbes, ). While some work reports higher rates of cooperation in depressed individuals (Sorgi & van't Wout, ), other studies report lower rates of cooperation (Clark et al., ; Pulcu et al., ; Surbey, ) or no behavioral differences compared to healthy controls (Gradin et al., ).…”

“…Of the little work utilizing game‐theoretical social dilemmas in child and adolescent samples, only few have investigated how psychiatric symptoms impact behavior in these situations (for reviews see Alarcón & Forbes, ; Sharp, ). While research using the trust game demonstrates less trustworthiness among boys with externalizing problems (Sharp, Ha, & Fonagy, ), children with more conduct symptoms display lower levels of, and are less likely to repair cooperation in a PD (Blake et al., ).…”

Neural correlates of emotion processing predict resilience in youth at familial risk for mood disorders

“…Increases in prosocial behaviors over time may underlie the observed improvement in global functioning within the RES group, and points to the potentially critical role of prosocial behaviors during this critical stage of emotional development. Previous studies have pointed to the protective factors of prosocial behaviors against the development of psychopathology (Alarcón & Forbes, 2017;Dang, 2014;Silk et al, 2007).…”