Everyday helping in the first year: Infants’ early prosocial behavior in the context of care

• In Event: 1-092 - Developing Prosociality in the First Year: Precursors and Early Forms of Helping, Sharing, and Empathy

Integrative Statement

Research on the emergence of prosocial behavior focuses primarily on infants aged 14 months and up (e.g., Hay & Cook, 2007; Warneken & Tomasello, 2007), a developmental period where infants are capable of relatively independent locomotion. However, an emerging body of research suggests that infants in the first year of life are capable of some forms of instrumental helping (e.g., handing over a dropped object; Dahl, 2015), and furthermore, that at least some prosocial behavior may emerge before 8 months of age (e.g., Hamlin, Wynn & Bloom, 2010; Hammond et al., 2017; Saether & Sommerville, 2016). Even before they are capable of much locomotion, infants can assist others by engaging in cooperative bodily actions, such as adjusting ones body to facilitate dressing or feeding practices for the caregiver (Reddy et al., 2013), and in the context of daily care and self-care tasks (e.g., being fed or changed), infants experience being helped, through individual social interactions styles may differ across caregivers.

At present, very little is known about prosocial behaviors before 8 months of age, and almost nothing is known about longitudinal relations between early appearing precursors to prosociality and later prosocial development, nor about the relation between motor and social developmental milestones and parental interaction styles and individual differences in the development of early helping. The present study presents longitudinal data from monthly (3-6 months) and bimonthly (8-12 months) visits of approximately 30 infants beginning at 3 months up 12 months of age [data collection ongoing – present data collection covers 3-8 months]. The study uses a mix of structured behavioral measures, semi-structured parent-infant interaction tasks, and parental report of infants’ early helping in the home. The study also includes questionnaire data on infants’ gross and fine motor, social, and communicative milestones (e.g., the ASQ-3, Briggs et al., 2012), collected at each time point. Preliminary results show that precursors of helping emerges at between 3-5 months of age, with a minority of parents reporting helpful behaviors at 3 months (approximately 25%) and the majority of parents (approximately 70%) reporting some forms of helpful behavior by 5 months of age in the contexts of care tasks (e.g., feeding; being picked up). Furthermore, individual differences in social and motor milestones at 3 months appear to predict later emerging helping behaviors. Instrumental helping (e.g., picking up a dropped item) begins to appear at 8 months of age, although only in a small number of infants. In the full study, both concurrent and longitudinal relations and trends in early prosocial development, and between contexts of helping (e.g., care tasks and instrumental helping contexts) will be analyzed and discussed in greater detail.

Authors

• Stuart Hammond, University of Ottawa
  Presenting Author

• Victoria L. Edwards, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ann Hérard, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anisa Yan, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Madison MacLachlan, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author