Which is true regarding prosocial behavior in toddlers 18 to 24 months of age?

Children begin to behave prosocially very early in life. Several studies have documented 1-year-old infants’ ability to participate in household tasks and help adults by fetching or pointing to out-of-reach objects (Liszkowski et al., 2006, Rheingold, 1982, Warneken and Tomasello, 2006, Warneken and Tomasello, 2007, Zahn-Waxler et al., 1992). Given that these apparently prosocial acts emerge early in ontogeny, developmental psychologists are interested in exploring how they are acquired and identifying the mechanisms underlying them. Prosocial behaviors are based on the observation and interpretation of another person’s demonstration of need. More specifically, they are thought to involve different abilities, including representing a problem from another person's perspective and possible solutions to this problem (Batson et al., 2008, Dunfield, 2014). Some scholars have proposed that an innate interest in people and what they do, combined with a tendency to imitate others, may explain young children’s initial prosocial responses (Grusec, 2006, Hay and Cook, 2007, Rheingold, 1982). Other researchers maintain that the critical contributor to early prosocial behavior is the developing ability to differentiate another person’s internal states from one’s own and to relate one’s own emotions and needs to those of another in order to act on the other’s behalf (Bischof-Köhler, 1991, Zahn-Waxler and Radke-Yarrow, 1990). In general, it is accepted that prosocial behavior in infants and toddlers is likely driven by their growing social understanding. Several studies have shown that children’s social understanding becomes increasingly “mentalistic” during the second year of life (Flavell, 1999), and in keeping with this their repertoire of prosocial behaviors becomes more diversified and sophisticated in late toddlerhood and the preschool years (Zahn-Waxler & Radke-Yarrow, 1982).

Furthermore, there is evidence that the different types or domains of prosocial behavior are not correlated but rather follow independent developmental trajectories and have different social and sociocognitive correlates (Conte, Grazzani, & Pepe, 2018, Dunfield et al., 2011, Kärtner et al., 2014, Schuhmacher et al., 2017, Svetlova et al., 2010). Helping, for example, is defined as an action that is intended to alleviate an instrumental need (Dunfield et al., 2011) and can also take the form of providing valuable information to someone who needs it (Liszkowski, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2008). It occurs when a child recognizes another person’s inability to complete an action and attempts to assist that person in his or her goal-directed efforts. Thus, helping behavior facilitates the achievement of someone else’s goal (Dahl, 2015). During their second year of life, children begin to help peers and adults (Dunfield, 2014) by fetching objects that are out of another person’s reach or carrying an object that an interlocutor cannot manage alone. At the same time, from around 12 months of age, children begin to provide desired or needed information to others, for example, by pointing to the location of an object that an adult is searching for (Liszkowski et al., 2006, Liszkowski et al., 2008, Warneken and Tomasello, 2015). Enacting helping behaviors such as these requires having first attributed specific goals to others, an ability that appears early on in development (Woodward, 1998). Once a child understands another person’s intention, the child must also identify how best to act in support of it (Dunfield, 2014). Sharing behaviors, on the other hand, entail voluntarily giving away a resource to another individual who is without this good and needs or desires it (Brownell, Iesue, Nichols, & Svetlova, 2013). Although giving to others is challenging for young children, at around 18 to 24 months of age they may be observed sharing food and toys; initially, they mainly produce such behaviors in response to the explicitly expressed desire of an interlocutor (Brownell et al., 2013, Brownell et al., 2009, Dunfield et al., 2011). From 2 years of age, children begin to share food, toys, and other objects more frequently and spontaneously (Hamann et al., 2011, Hay and Cook, 2007). Sharing behaviors require the ability to recognize an unmet material desire, whereby another person desires or needs something he or she has not currently received. In other words, children must identify an unequal distribution of resources and appreciate that it is giving rise to a negative emotional state in an interlocutor. And indeed, between 2 and 3 years of age, children begin to act with a view to relieving emotional distress in others (Dunfield, 2014, Dunfield and Kuhlmeier, 2013). Comforting—also known as empathic comforting—behaviors are actions intended to alleviate another person’s negative emotional or physical state (Zahn-Waxler & Radke-Yarrow, 1990). Young children can respond in a variety of ways to the emotional needs they observe in others (Eisenberg, Shea, Carlo, & Knight, 1991); their reactions depend on, among other factors, their current level of social cognitive and prosocial maturity (Hoffman, 2000) as well as their degree of familiarity with interlocutors (Zahn-Waxler et al., 1992). In any case, such prosocial behaviors rely on the ability to represent others’ negative emotional states; children must be able to distinguish between and identify emotions, especially negative ones. This ability first emerges during the early months of life when infants begin to differentiate between facial expressions of positive and negative emotion (Grossmann, 2010). By 18 months, young children have begun to understand that people can have different emotional experiences (Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997). However, these abilities alone are not sufficient to support comforting, which also requires causes and solutions to be mentally represented, a capacity that is more likely to emerge between the second and fourth years of life (Dunfield, 2014). Indeed, whereas at 2 years of age children can recognize that simple desires trigger emotions and behaviors (Wellman & Woolley, 1990), from 3 to 5 years they gradually develop the ability to predict what situational antecedents will lead to positive and negative emotions (Denham and Couchoud, 1990, Widen and Russell, 2003).

Few scholars have investigated the role of gender differences in the development of prosocial behaviors (Denham et al., 2012, Dunfield et al., 2011, Eisenberg et al., 2006). Despite the prevailing view that girls display a greater propensity to act prosocially than boys, research findings have varied as a function of age and type of prosocial behavior. From toddlerhood onward, girls have been found to express more empathy and engage in more prosocial conduct than boys (Zahn-Waxler et al., 1992). More specifically, female prosocial behavior may be more compassionate and sympathetic, whereas male prosocial behavior may be more agentic, engaged, and active (Hastings, Utendale, & Sullivan, 2007). These differences emerge from the third year of life and may intensify over the preschool and school years (Baillargeon et al., 2011, Sebanc, 2003). For example, Baillargeon et al. (2011) reported a higher incidence of prosocial behavior in girls, especially in the domains of comforting and helping.

Growing empirical evidence that developing socioemotional skills is crucial to children’s later social adjustment has driven the design of prevention programs and encouraged scholars to investigate how gains in social and emotional learning may be fostered via training interventions in educational settings. Although such programs have not always specifically targeted the promotion of prosocial behaviors, many training studies have been reported to affect predictors of prosocial behavior (e.g., empathy, understanding one’s own and others’ emotions, perspective taking). Malti, Chaparro, Zuffianò, and Colasante (2016) conducted a meta-analytic review of 19 school-based social and emotional learning (SEL) programs implemented from kindergarten to eighth grade that targeted empathy-related behaviors, including prosocial behaviors. The authors found that these programs had stronger effects on both social and academic outcomes when they were implemented with younger children and incorporated more empathy-related skills such as emotion understanding and perspective taking. Other school-based programs not included in the review by Malti and colleagues have had similar effects. For example, Roots of Empathy (ROE; Gordon, 2005), a preventive program focused on reducing aggression and facilitating the development of socioemotional understanding and prosocial behaviors, produced significant improvement across multiple domains, as reflected in measures such as peer assessment of prosocial behaviors in school-age children (Schonert-Reichl, Smith, Zaidman-Zait, & Hertzman, 2012). Flook, Goldberg, Pinger, and Davidson (2015) obtained similar outcomes with their mindfulness-based curriculum for preschoolers, providing further evidence for the positive impact of classroom-based SEL programs on children’s social development and prosocial behaviors.

Alongside the development and implementation of prevention programs, another line of research has focused on the role of conversation about emotions and other inner states in promoting early prosociality. Initial studies conducted in family settings showed that parents’ discourse on emotion-related topics fosters young children’s understanding of emotions and inner states and their awareness of how and when to act on that understanding in a prosocial way (Brownell et al., 2013, Brownell & Early Social Development Research Lab, 2016; Drummond et al., 2014, Dunn, 1988, Garner et al., 2008, Thompson, 2006). Indeed, parental talk about inner states has repeatedly been shown to predict prosocial behavior. For example, maternal explanations of emotions are related to toddlers’ behavioral attempts to comprehend the emotional state of a distressed other (Garner, 2003). Furthermore, having had the opportunity to dialogue about emotions is associated with displays of empathy-related responsiveness and prosocial behavior in preschoolers (Denham, 1997, Denham and Grout, 1992).

In light of these findings, researchers have begun to investigate how inner-state conversation may be leveraged in educational contexts as well (Denham et al., 2012). This area of research has included conversational training studies conducted with preschoolers (Ornaghi, Grazzani, Cherubin, Conte, & Piralli, 2015) and, only during recent years, with 2- and 3-year-old children (Grazzani et al., 2016, Ornaghi et al., 2017). In these studies, children in the experimental condition conversed about inner states, whereas children in the control condition engaged in free play or played with structured materials after listening to emotion-themed stories.

In the current study, we adopted a conversational approach (Siegal, 1999, Turnbull and Carpendale, 1999) in keeping with the social constructionist perspective underpinning our research program. Numerous authors have emphasized that a key factor in children’s development of social cognition is participation in everyday conversation. Talking to others is viewed as an advanced form of social interaction that allows children to improve their awareness of their own and others’ internal states such as intentions, beliefs, desires, and emotions. Throughout childhood, conversational activities such as explaining mental states and discussing them with other people make a crucial contribution to children’s understanding of the mind (de Rosnay & Hughes, 2006).

In keeping with this view, the current study offers a couple of original features with respect to the existing literature. First, as far as we know, no previous studies conducted with toddlers aimed to foster prosocial behavior by means of systematic intervention in the nursery setting. Second, although some of the studies mentioned above (e.g., Ornaghi et al., 2017) already evaluated the relative efficacy of different conversational practices by comparing two conditions (conversation about mental states vs. absence of conversation), in this study we added a third condition (conversation about physical states). This was done to more rigorously test the hypothesis that it is not conversation per se but specifically conservation about inner states and prosocial behavior that promotes gains in prosociality. In previous studies that compared an experimental group which engaged in conversations about inner states with a control group that took part in no additional conversations (i.e., that was not involved in any ad hoc linguistic activities), it was not possible to firmly establish whether the extra improvement seen in the experimental group was the result of conversation rich in mental states talk or just of conversation in general. To show that additional gains were due to participating in talk about mental states and prosocial action specifically, both the experimental group and the control group needed to be involved in conversational activities.

Thus, the aim of the study was to examine the efficacy of a conversation-based intervention (the TEPP, Toddlers Empathy Prosociality Program) in fostering toddlers’ prosocial development. Given the positive outcomes of earlier conversational work, we expected that the toddlers in Condition 1 (conversation about inner states and prosocial behaviors) would outperform their peers in Condition 2 (conversation about physical states) and Condition 3 (no conversation; play activities only) on the administered measures of prosocial behavior. In addition, given that the existing research on the development of prosociality during the early years of life has yielded mixed findings in relation to the role of gender, we did not make any specific predictions about whether or how the research outcomes might vary as a function of gender.