From understanding others' needs to prosocial action: Motor and social abilities promote infants' helping

Neural and Physiological Correlates of Prosocial Behavior: Temporoparietal Junction Activity in 3-year-old Children

Although the development of prosocial behavior has been widely studied from the behavioral aspect, the neural mechanisms underlying prosocial behavior in the early stages of development remain unclear. Therefore, this study investigated the neural mechanisms underlying the emergence of prosocial behavior in 3-year-old children. Brain activity in the medial pFC and right TPJ (rTPJ) and facial expression activity, which are related to the ability to infer others' mental states (mentalizing), during the observation of prosocial and antisocial scenes were measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy and electromyography, respectively. Subsequently, the children's helping and comforting behaviors toward an experimenter were assessed to examine prosocial behavioral tendencies. A correlation analysis revealed that the children who showed stronger activity levels in the rTPJ while observing prosocial scenes had more immediate helping behaviors toward others than those who did not show stronger response levels. Moreover, the amount of facial expression activity correlated with prosocial behavior, including both helping and comforting behaviors. These results suggest that the development of mentalizing ability and the social evaluation of others' actions, mediated by the rTPJ, contribute to the emergence of prosocial behavior.

Early social-cognitive development as a dynamic developmental system-a lifeworld approach

Based on developmental systems and dynamic systems theories, we propose the lifeworld approach-a conceptual framework for research and a hypothesis concerning early social-cognitive development. As a framework, the lifeworld approach recognizes the social embeddedness of development and shifts the focus away from individual developmental outcomes toward the reciprocal interplay of processes within and between individuals that co-constitutes early social-cognitive development. As a hypothesis, the lifeworld approach proposes that the changing developmental system-spanning the different individuals as their subsystems-strives toward attractor states through regulation at the behavioral level, which results in both the emergence and further differentiation of developmental attainments. The lifeworld approach-as a framework and a hypothesis, including key methodological approaches to test it-is exemplified by research on infants' self-awareness, prosocial behavior and social learning. Equipped with, first, a conceptual framework grounded in a modern view on development and, second, a growing suite of methodological approaches, developmental science can advance by analyzing the mutually influential relations between intra-individual and interactional processes in order to identify key mechanisms underlying early social-cognitive development.

Less attention to emotional faces is associated with low empathy and prosociality in 12-to 20-month old infants

The development of empathy and prosocial behavior begins in infancy and is likely supported by emotion processing skills. The current study explored whether early emerging deficits in emotion processing are associated with disruptions in the development of empathy and prosociality. We investigated this question in a large, diverse sample of 147, 11- to 20-month-old infants (42% female; 61% Black; 67% low socioeconomic status). Infants completed two observational tasks assessing prosocial helping and one task assessing empathy and prosocial comforting behavior. Infants also completed an eye-tracking task assessing engagement and disengagement with negative emotional faces. Infants who attended less to angry, sad, and fearful faces (i.e., by being slower to look at and/or quicker to look away from negative compared to neutral faces) engaged in fewer helping behaviors, and effect sizes were larger when examining infants' attention toward the eye regions of faces. Additionally, infants who were quicker to look away from the eye regions of angry faces, but not the whole face, displayed less empathy and comforting behaviors. Results suggest that as early as 12 months of age, infants' decreased attention toward negative emotional faces, particularly the eye regions, is associated with less empathy and prosociality during a developmental period in which these abilities are rapidly maturing.

Preverbal infants' understanding of social norms

Social norms are foundational to human cooperation and co-existence in social groups. A crucial marker of social norms is that a behavior is not only shared, but that the conformity to the behavior of others is a basis for social evaluation (i.e., reinforcement and sanctioning), taking the is, how individuals usually behave, to an ought, how individuals should behave to be socially approved by others. In this preregistered study, we show that 11-month-old infants grasp this fundamental aspect about social norms already in their first year. They showed a pupillary surprise response for unexpected social responses, namely the disapproval and exclusion of an individual who showed the same behavior like others or the approval and inclusion of an individual who behaved differently. That preverbal infants link the conformity with others' behavior to social evaluations, before they respond to norm violations themselves, indicates that the foundations of social norm understanding lie in early infancy.

Toddlers' affective responses to sociomoral scenes: Insights from physiological measures

A growing literature suggests that preverbal infants are sensitive to sociomoral scenes and prefer prosocial agents over antisocial agents. It remains unclear, however, whether and how emotional processes are implicated in infants' responses to prosocial/antisocial actions. Although a recent study found that infants and toddlers showed more positive facial expressions after viewing helping (vs. hindering) events, these findings were based on naïve coder ratings of facial activity; furthermore, effect sizes were small. The current studies examined 18- and 24-month-old toddlers' real-time reactivity to helping and hindering interactions using three physiological measures of emotion-related processes. At 18 months, activity in facial musculature involved in smiling/frowning was explored via facial electromyography (EMG). At 24 months, stress (sweat) was explored via electrodermal activity (EDA). At both ages, arousal was explored via pupillometry. Behaviorally, infants showed no preferences for the helper over the hinderer across age groups. EMG analyses revealed that 18-month-olds showed higher corrugator activity (more frowning) during hindering (vs. helping) actions, followed by lower corrugator activity (less frowning) after hindering (vs. helping) actions finished. These findings suggest that antisocial actions elicited negativity, perhaps followed by brief disengagement. EDA analyses revealed no significant event-related differences. Pupillometry analyses revealed that both 18- and 24-month-olds' pupils were smaller after viewing hindering (vs. helping), replicating recent evidence with 5-month-olds and suggesting that toddlers also show less arousal following hindering than following helping. Together, these results provide new evidence with respect to whether and how arousal/affective processes are involved when infants process sociomoral scenarios.

Prosocial Behavior in Toddlerhood: The Contribution of Emotion Knowledge, Theory of Mind, and Language Ability

While scholars have previously investigated the respective contributions of emotional knowledge and language ability to toddlers' prosociality, no studies to date have featured a battery of multiple direct measures assessing both of these abilities plus theory of mind on the one hand, and prosocial behavior on the other hand. In contrast, we conducted the present cross-sectional study with a view to evaluating the unique contributions of each of these three social cognition variables as antecedents of prosocial conduct during toddlerhood, measuring them via a series of individually administered standardized tasks. Furthermore, given that the existing literature documents mixed gender effects, we also set out to explore the role of gender in toddlers' prosociality. Finally, we also controlled for any effects of age on the patterns of association among the key variables. Participants were 127 children aged between 24 and 36 months (M = 29.2 months; SD = 3.5). We identified significant correlations among the variables under study. In addition, stepwise multiple regression analysis suggested that each of the social cognition (SC) abilities – i.e., emotion knowledge, theory of mind, and language - made a unique contribution to explaining variance in prosocial behaviors (PB). These findings show that SC is already associated with PB in toddlerhood and suggest the importance of fostering social cognition competence from the early years, with a view to increasing children's propensity to engage in prosocial conduct.

A longitudinal study of the differential social-cognitive foundations of early prosocial behaviors

A growing body of work has documented the emergence of instrumental helping and sharing in the second year of life; however, less is known about mechanisms that underlie development and production of prosocial behavior. The current study took a longitudinal approach to explore whether the origins of prosocial behaviors can be traced back to foundational social-cognitive capacities emerging in infancy. In a sample of 90 children, longitudinal relations were examined between intention understanding and joint attention measured in infancy (8-12 months) and later instrumental helping and sharing behavior assessed in the toddler years (18-25 months). We expected social-cognitive capacities supporting infants' understanding of others to be positively related to their prosocial behaviors as toddlers. Measured variable path analyses revealed two distinct developmental pathways from infant social cognition to later prosocial behavior: 1) Instrumental helping in the toddler years was positively predicted by intention understanding in infancy; 2) sharing in the toddler years was positively predicted by infants' initiating joint attention. These results lend support to proposals on the multidimensional nature of early prosocial behavior and offer the first longitudinal evidence that the origins of toddlers' prosocial behavior can be traced to social-cognitive capacities emerging in infancy.

Culture and early social-cognitive development

From a developmental systems perspective, this chapter focuses on the question whether culture matters for children's early social-cognitive development. Based on a review of the current cross-cultural literature, we evaluate the current state of research on cross-cultural similarities and differences in major developmental milestones of early social cognition, namely (i) the development of self-awareness and an understanding of self and others as intentional agents, (ii) advanced forms of social learning and (iii) prosocial cognition and behavior. Overall, the current cross-cultural research suggests universality without uniformity: the common suite of social-cognitive skills emerges reliably and, at the same time, there are culture-specific accentuations of social-cognitive development across domains that mostly are in line with cultural values, beliefs and practices. By following different agendas when providing and structuring physical and social settings for their children, caregivers coherently organize infants' nascent intuitions, sentiments, and inclinations into increasingly coherent patterns of attention, appraisal, experience and behavior that are in line with cultural ideals and beliefs. By doing so, culturally informed social interaction sets the stage for culture-specific modulations of social cognition already in the first years of life.

Making Sense of the World: Infant Learning From a Predictive Processing Perspective

For human infants, the first years after birth are a period of intense exploration-getting to understand their own competencies in interaction with a complex physical and social environment. In contemporary neuroscience, the predictive-processing framework has been proposed as a general working principle of the human brain, the optimization of predictions about the consequences of one's own actions, and sensory inputs from the environment. However, the predictive-processing framework has rarely been applied to infancy research. We argue that a predictive-processing framework may provide a unifying perspective on several phenomena of infant development and learning that may seem unrelated at first sight. These phenomena include statistical learning principles, infants' motor and proprioceptive learning, and infants' basic understanding of their physical and social environment. We discuss how a predictive-processing perspective can advance the understanding of infants' early learning processes in theory, research, and application.