Shyness and Social Conflict Reduce Young Children's Social Helpfulness

Abstract

This study examined social influences on 3-year-old children's decisions to help an experimenter gain another person's attention (N = 32). Children were slower to help the experimenter when the target had previously expressed disinterest in attending to her. Shy children were less likely to support the experimenter's attempts to communicate with the target; however, this association was not influenced by children's knowledge of the target's disinterest, and there was no relation between shyness and children's support for a separate physical goal. Therefore, young children's decisions to act helpfully incorporate consideration for others beyond a focal person with an unmet need, and they are further constrained by children's own comfort with the actions required to help.

Getting help for others: An examination of indirect helping in young children.

“…The current findings indicate that social inhibition is an important barrier to helping behavior when helping would require communicative interaction. This is consistent with an earlier observation, in which children had to convey information between two experimenters (Beier et al, 2016). In that study, like the present one, shy children were less likely to intervene.…”

The Homogeneity and Heterogeneity of Moral Functioning in Preschool

“…Specifically, children who performed more prosocial behaviors were less shy, better at understanding others' mental states, better at recognizing facial expressions (see also Table S2 for correlation between prosocial behaviors and real-apparent emotion understanding), and more empathic. These findings are consistent with the idea that prosocial behaviors require the abilities to understand others' mental states (Imuta et al, 2016), recognize overt expressions of negative states (Grossmann, 2018;Rajhans, Altvater-Mackensen, Vaish, & Grossmann, 2016), overcome social inhibition (Beier et al, 2017;Karasewich et al, 2018), and show sympathy to others (Holmgren, Eisenberg, & Fabes, 1998). After controlling for age and gender, empathic concern was the strongest predictor of prosocial behaviors above and beyond other cognitive and emotional factors.…”

“…To test this hypothesis, it is important to first clarify how basic cognitive and emotional mechanisms are related to different aspects of moral functioning. In the recent literature, individual aspects of moral functioning have been linked to a host of cognitive and emotional factors, including general intelligence (Derryberry, Wilson, Snyder, Norman, & Barger, 2005), executive functioning (Paulus et al, 2015), theory‐of‐mind (Imuta, Henry, Slaughter, Selcuk, & Ruffman, 2016; Killen et al, 2011), emotion recognition (Grossmann, 2018), empathy (Ball, Smetana, & Sturge‐Apple, 2017), and social inhibition (Beier, Terrizzi, Woodward, & Larson, 2017; Karasewich, Kuhlmeier, Beier, & Dunfield, 2018; Smetana et al, 2012). Although these processes have been examined in relation to local aspects of moral functioning, no studies have yet explored how cognitive and emotional processes influence a wide range of moral behaviors and evaluations within the same children.…”

Helping, Sharing, and Comforting in Young Children: Links to Individual Differences in Attachment

“…Consequently, the rubric for each task identified different levels of supportiveness for both verbal and nonverbal response (see Dunfield & Kuhlmeier, 2013, for similar considerations). Following prior research (e.g., Beier, Terrizzi, Woodward, & Larson, 2017;Svetlova et al, 2010), we also incorporated the speed of responses into children's prosocial scores to capture the full variation in strength of children's prosocial behavior. Latencies may reflect children's eagerness to act prosocially or the extent to which they required the experimenter's increasingly clear explanations before formulating and executing a response.…”