Variability in social reasoning: the influence of attachment security on the attribution of goals

Twelve months old infants' evaluation of observed comforting behavior using a choice paradigm: The role of animacy cues and self-distress

Comforting is a prosocial behavior that children start to engage in around their second year of life. There is much less known about their ability to evaluate comforting behavior of others. The current study examined whether 12 months old infants, after having watched animated abstract characters comfort or ignore a third party in distress, would show a preference for the comforting character. Using a manual choice paradigm, we found that infants were more likely to choose the comforting character than the ignoring character (Experiment 1). When the characters however lacked human surface features (eyes) infants did not show a preference (Experiment 2). Furthermore, infants self-distress during the watching of the animations did not prevent infants to evaluate the behavior of the observed characters. These findings support the idea of an early presence of "moral sense" in infancy.

Motivating Moral Behavior: Helping, Sharing, and Comforting in Young Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

This exploratory study examined the role of social-cognitive development in the production of moral behavior. Specifically, we explored the propensity of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to engage in helping, sharing, and comforting acts, addressing two specific questions: (1) Compared to their typically developing (TD) peers, how do young children with ASD perform on three prosocial tasks that require the recognition of different kinds of need (instrumental, material, and emotional), and (2) are children with ASD adept at distinguishing situations in which an adult needs assistance from perceptually similar situations in which the need is absent? Children with ASD demonstrated low levels of helping and sharing but provided comfort at levels consistent with their TD peers. Children with ASD also tended to differentiate situations where a need was present from situations in which it was absent. Together, these results provided an initial demonstration that young children with ASD have the ability to take another's perspective and represent their internal need states. However, when the cost of engaging in prosocial behavior is high (e.g., helping and sharing), children with ASD may be less inclined to engage in the behavior, suggesting that both the capacity to recognize another's need and the motivation to act on behalf of another appear to play important roles in the production of prosocial behavior. Further, differential responding on the helping, sharing, and comforting tasks lend support to current proposals that the domain of moral behavior is comprised of a variety of distinct subtypes of prosocial behavior.

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

Although attachment theory has long posited a link between early experiences of care and children's prosocial behavior, investigations of this association have not embraced the multifaceted nature of prosociality. This study is the first to assess associations between child attachment and independent observations of helping, sharing, and comforting. Attachment quality in 3- to 5-year-old children (N = 137) was linked to all three prosocial behaviors. Additionally, bifactor analyses revealed distinct associations between attachment and children's general prosocial dispositions and their specific abilities to meet the unique challenges of helping and, marginally, comforting. These findings underscore the importance of considering multiple explanations for links between attachment and prosocial behavior and provide novel insights into sources of variation in children's prosociality.