Using a population-based, panel survey, we study how egocentric social networks change over time, and the relationship between egocentric network properties and health and pro-social behaviors. We find that the number of prosocial activities is strongly positively associated with having more friends, or an increase in degree, with approximately 0.04 more prosocial behaviors expected for every f...

This study aimed at examining reciprocal associations among teacher–child interactions, teachers' work engagement, and children's social competence across grade 1. The participants were 51 Finnish teachers 815 children. quality of interactions (emotional support, classroom organization, instructional support) was assessed with the Classroom Assessment Scoring System. In addition, reported their...

This study examines the effects of the Roots of Empathy (ROE) program on children’s social-emotional competence. ROE is a theoretically derived universal preventive program that focuses on decreasing children’s aggression and facilitating the development of their socialemotional understanding and prosocial behaviors. The program has as its cornerstone monthly visits by an infant and his/her par...

Human prosociality is marked by the versatility with which we help across various contexts. New research highlights that this capacity emerges early in human ontogeny. In this article, I review evidence showing that young children’s helping is both flexible and robust, based upon inferential social-cognitive capacities and prosocial motivations. Then I discuss the possible evolutionary function...

Prosocial behaviors begin to emerge at an early age (e.g., Damon, 1975; Rheingold et al., 1976; Eisenberg and Fabes, 1998; Thompson et al., 1997; Paulus, 2014). For example, helping behaviors are demonstrated by infants as young as 18 months of age (e.g., Warneken and Tomasello, 2006) and sharing behavior begins to emerge at around 2 years of age (e.g., Rheingold et al., 1976). Such prosocialit...

Many schools and parents try to motivate children to become defenders of victimized peers. Defending behavior is common in the media (particularly in superhero programs); however, no study has examined the effect of media on defending behavior. The aim of the study was to examine longitudinal associations between superhero engagement and a variety of aggressive, prosocial, and defending behavio...

Nation-level differences in individuals' reports of helping strangers, donating money to charity, and volunteering time were analyzed, drawing on nationally representative survey data from 135 nations. Frequency of these three behaviors yielded a reliable index of prosocial behavior. All three behaviors were found to be more frequent in nations that score low on an index of in-group favoritism ...