Rethinking emotions in the context of infants' prosocial behavior: The role of interest and positive emotions.

Emotions form the foundation of infants' early social interactions and yet their role in prosocial behaviors is generally limited to situations of distress and other negative emotions. The present article argues that both positive emotions and the emotion of interest play important roles in prosocial behavior and development. First, we explore the ways in which positive emotions characterize infants' everyday prosocial behavior and the relationships that support these behaviors.

Explicit scaffolding increases simple helping in younger infants.

Infants become increasingly helpful during the second year. We investigated experimentally whether adults' explicit scaffolding influences this development. Infants (N = 69, 13-18 months old) participated in a series of simple helping tasks.

Helping the One You Hurt: Toddlers' Rudimentary Guilt, Shame, and Prosocial Behavior After Harming Another.

This study explored the role of guilt and shame in early prosocial behavior by extending previous findings that guilt- and shame-like responses can be distinguished in toddlers and, for the first time, examining their associations with helping. Toddlers (n = 32; M  = 28.9 months) were led to believe they broke an adult's toy, after which they exhibited either a guilt-like response that included frequently confessing their behavior and trying to repair the toy; or a shame-like response that included frequently avoiding the adult and seldom confessing or attempting to repair the toy.

Individual differences in toddlers' social understanding and prosocial behavior: disposition or socialization?

We examined how individual differences in social understanding contribute to variability in early-appearing prosocial behavior. Moreover, potential sources of variability in social understanding were explored and examined as additional possible predictors of prosocial behavior. Using a multi-method approach with both observed and parent-report measures, 325 children aged 18-30 months were administered measures of social understanding (e.

Here, there and everywhere: emotion and mental state talk in different social contexts predicts empathic helping in toddlers.

A growing body of literature suggests that parents socialize early-emerging prosocial behavior across varied contexts and in subtle yet powerful ways. We focus on discourse about emotions and mental states as one potential socialization mechanism given its conceptual relevance to prosocial behavior and its known positive relations with emotion understanding and social-cognitive development, as well as parents' frequent use of such discourse beginning in infancy. Specifically, we ask how parents' emotion and mental state talk (EMST) with their toddlers relates to toddlers' helping and how these associations vary by context.

Socialization of Early Prosocial Behavior: Parents' Talk about Emotions is Associated with Sharing and Helping in Toddlers.

What role does socialization play in the origins of prosocial behavior? We examined one potential socialization mechanism, parents' discourse about others' emotions with very young children in whom prosocial behavior is still nascent. Two studies are reported, one of sharing in 18- and 24-month-olds (n = 29), and one of instrumental and empathy-based helping in 18- and 30-month-olds (n = 62). In both studies, parents read age-appropriate picture books to their children and the content and structure of their emotion-related and internal state discourse were coded.