Children's prosocial tendencies– how often and how effectively they complete behaviors that benefit others– predict later altruism and academic achievement. Recent research has supported the existence of three domains of childhood prosocial behavior: helping, sharing, and comforting. In order to be effectively prosocial, children must recognize an actor's negative state, recognize the cause of that negative state, and possess the motivation to alleviate the negative state. Because the recognition of another's negative state implies a level of perspective-taking ability, I investigated how prosocial behaviors relate to early representational and emotional perspective-taking skills, using an adapted version of Megan Dolan's 2017 Socioemotional Assessment (SEA), a false belief task, and a novel Affective Perspective Taking (APT) task which assessed children's understanding of predictable and surprising emotions. Significant relationships were found between both children's false belief understanding and SEA scores, and their performance on the congruent (predictable emotion) trials of the APT task. The results suggest that emotional perspective-taking, more so than representational perspective-taking, predicts children's prosocial tendencies.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 24202