The Cradle of Compassion: Early Development of Prosocial Behavior

描述（由申请人提供）：亲社会行为是个体幸福和健康的心理社会和身体发展的核心方面。这个项目的目的是通过指定成长模式和测试在生命的第二和第三年，亲社会反应首次出现时促进其发展的特定机制，来提高我们对这一重要行为早期发展的有限理解。更好地理解早期的亲社会反应有助于识别自闭症等发育障碍的早期标志，从而允许早期干预工作，并促进表现出高度攻击性和外化行为的幼儿的长期积极适应。本研究主要有三个目的：1)了解12 ~ 30月龄儿童亲社会分享行为的发展历程与成人交际支持和分享接受者的关系；2)确定亲社会分享成长的两个潜在机制：社会理解的发展和母亲与孩子谈论他人的心理状态；3)确定幼儿社会理解的发展是否在母亲心理状态谈话对幼儿分享倾向发展的影响中起中介作用。采用互补的横断面和纵向设计，将对7个年龄（12、15、18、21、24、27和30个月）的40 - 120名儿童执行一套标准的分享任务，其中母亲或女性实验者作为潜在的接受者。所有的任务都是相似的，因为孩子有过多的物质资源（例如，汽车，堆叠环），而游戏伙伴和潜在的共享接受者没有。伴侣会提供一系列关于她的需求和欲望的线索，这些线索将以一个公开的要求达到高潮。孩子们将根据他们是否分享以及如果分享，在这一系列线索中的哪一点进行评分。他们还将接受一系列任务，以索引早期社会理解的三个概念相关方面：自我-他人理解、情感理解和所有权理解。最后，在纵向样本中，父母会给孩子朗读无文字的绘本，绘本中描绘了各种情绪以及其他内容；父母的情绪和精神状态谈话将从这些内容中转录出来。分析将确定主要构念（分享；社会理解；父母心理状态谈话）的年龄差异。他们还将识别分享和社会理解之间的并发和预测性关联，以及分享和父母心理状态谈话之间的关联，超越年龄和控制变量，如家庭人口特征、性别、气质、亲子关系质量和儿童依从性。最后，他们将探讨社会理解差异是否介导母亲情绪和心理状态谈话对亲社会行为发展的影响。基于对亲社会行为、社会理解和父母心理状态话语的早期发展的小型但有趣的研究的独特整合，并使用新的任务和程序，本项目将构成分享的出现和早期发展及其与发展社会理解的关系的第一个系统的、可控的实验研究；这一时期社会化与分享相关的第一次检验；第一个确定幼儿的社会理解是否以及如何调节社会化对亲社会行为的影响。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Prosocial behavior is a core aspect of individuals' well-being and healthy psychosocial and physical development. The purpose of the proposed project is to advance our limited understanding of the early development of this important behavior by specifying patterns of growth and testing specific mechanisms contributing to its development in the second and third years of life when prosocial responses first emerge. Better understanding of early prosocial responsiveness holds promise for identifying early markers for developmental disorders like autism which would permit earlier intervention efforts, and for promoting long-term positive adjustment in very young children who exhibit heightened aggression and externalizing behavior. The proposed research has three aims: 1) to map the developmental course of prosocial sharing between 12 and 30 months of age in relation to adults' communicative support and the sharing recipient; 2) to determine how two potential underlying mechanisms relate to the growth of prosocial sharing: developing social understanding, and mothers' talk with their children about others' mental states; 3) to determine whether young children's developing social understanding mediates the effects of mothers' talk about mental states on children's developing propensity to share. Using complementary cross-sectional and longitudinal designs, a standard set of sharing tasks will be administered to 40 - 120 children at each of 7 ages (12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27, and 30 months), with either mother or a female experimenter as potential recipient. All tasks are similar in that the child has an overabundance of a material resource (e.g., cars, stacking rings) while the play partner and potential sharing recipient has none. The partner will provide a graded series of cues as to her need and desire, which will culminate in an overt request. Children will be scored for whether they share or not and if so, at what point in the series of cues. They will also be administered a series of tasks to index three conceptually related aspects of early social understanding: self-other understanding, emotion understanding, and ownership understanding. Finally, in the longitudinal sample, parents will read wordless picture books to their children which depict various emotions along with other content; parents' emotion and mental state talk will be transcribed from these. Analyses will identify age differences in the primary constructs (sharing; social understanding; parents' mental state talk). They will also identify concurrent and predictive associations between sharing and social understanding, and between sharing and parent mental state talk, above and beyond age and control variables such as family demographic characteristics, gender, temperament, parent-child relationship quality, and child compliance. Finally, they will address whether differences in social understanding mediate the effects of mothers' emotion and mental state talk on developing prosocial behavior. Based on a unique integration of the small but intriguing research on early developments in prosocial behavior, social understanding, and parents' mental state discourse, and using novel tasks and procedures, the proposed project will constitute the first systematic, controlled, experimental study of the emergence and early development of sharing and its relation to developing social understanding; the first examination of socialization correlates of sharing in this age period; and the first to determine whether and how social understanding in very young children mediates socialization effects on prosocial behavior. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Prosocial behavior is a core aspect of individuals' well-being and healthy development. Although much recent research has addressed the origins and early development of antisocial behavior, little is known about its complement, the origins of prosocial behavior. With greater understanding of early developments in prosocial behavior and specific socialization influences, we can begin to understand what may go awry in poorly understood developmental disorders like autism; inform preventive interventions for young children at risk for heightened aggression; and provide parents and educators with the requisite knowledge to help young children become more prosocial and to promote long-term health.