Task demands matter in shaping how preschoolers express instrumental helping, comforting, and sharing: A longitudinal analysis.

Autor: Gibhardt S; School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland 1010, New Zealand; Humboldt Research Group for Child Development, Leipzig University, 04109 Leipzig, Germany. Electronic address: sina.gibhardt@uni-leipzig.de., Aitken J; School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland 1010, New Zealand., Low R; School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington 6140, New Zealand., Henderson AME; School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland 1010, New Zealand.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Journal of experimental child psychology [J Exp Child Psychol] 2024 Jul; Vol. 243, pp. 105929. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Apr 25.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2024.105929
Abstrakt: The current research provides a detailed longitudinal examination of instrumental helping, comforting, and sharing in early childhood. Preschoolers completed a series of prosocial behavior tasks when they were 2 years old (n = 200), 3 years old (n = 161), and 4 years old (n = 135). As expected, children's prosocial behaviors increased with age across all tasks. Yet children's prosocial behaviors were more nuanced than expected, with significant differences in scores between trials within each type of prosocial behavior. Cross-lagged panel modelling revealed that instrumental helping at 3 years predicted comforting when an experimenter was sad or cold at 4 years. Furthermore, children's comforting of a sad experimenter at 3 years predicted sharing their own toy with a sad experimenter at 4 years. These findings offer novel insights into the developmental trajectory of three types of prosocial behavior in early childhood.
(Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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