Research examining the issue of video game violence influences on aggression continues to be debated within the scientific community. Thus far, no consensus has been reached regarding the influence of such games. This study adds to the prior literature by examining how violent video games may promote prosocial or aggressive behavior when played either cooperatively or alone. Results indicated t...

The relation between empathy subtypes and prosocial behavior was investigated in a sample of healthy adults. "Empathic concern" and "empathic happiness", defined as negative and positive vicarious emotion (respectively) combined with an other-oriented feeling of "goodwill" (i.e. a thought to do good to others/see others happy), were elicited in 68 adult participants who watched video clips extr...

Theorists from diverse disciplines purport narrative fiction serves to foster empathic development and growth. In two studies, participants’ subjective, behavioral, and perceptual responses were observed after reading a short fictional story. In study 1, participants who were more transported into the story exhibited higher affective empathy and were more likely to engage in prosocial behavior....

This meta-analytic review of 42 studies covering 8,009 participants examines the relation of moral emotion attributions to prosocial and antisocial behavior. A significant association is found between moral emotion attributions and prosocial and antisocial behaviors (d = .26, 95% CI: 0.15, 0.38; d = .39, 95% CI: 0.29, 0.49). Effect sizes differ considerably across studies and this heterogeneity...

Preschool children (N = 78) enrolled in multi-informant, multi-method longitudinal study were participants in a study designed to investigate the role of media exposure (i.e., violent and educational) on concurrent and future aggressive and prosocial behavior. Specifically, the amount of media exposure and nature of the content was used to predict concurrent and future physical, verbal and rela...

Despite empathy's importance for promoting social interactions, neuroimaging research has largely overlooked empathy during social experiences. Here, we examined neural activity during empathy for social exclusion and assessed how empathy-related neural processes might relate to subsequent prosocial behavior toward the excluded victim. During an fMRI scan, participants observed one person being...

An experiment is reported that examined the independent effects of television content (violence) and television formal features (action level) on children's attention to programs and their postviewing social behavior. Pairs of preschool boys participated in two experimental sessions in which they saw animated and live television programs that varied in violent content (high or low) and formal f...

The ability of the emotion gratitude to shape costly prosocial behavior was examined in three studies employing interpersonal emotion inductions and requests for assistance. Study 1 demonstrated that gratitude increases efforts to assist a benefactor evenwhen such efforts are costly (i.e., hedonically negative), and that this increase differs from the effects of a general positive affective sta...

word count: 150 Word count (including references): 13,120 PROSOCIAL CONFORMITY 2