Poster #129 - Sources of children’s happiness from giving to others

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

Generous actions provide benefits to those who behave generously in addition to those who are recipients of generosity. Both adults (Dunn, Aknin & Norton, 2008) and children (Aknin, Hamlin, & Dunn, 2012) experience greater happiness after giving to others than after receiving resources for themselves, suggesting that positive emotions reward and promote generosity from a young age (Aknin, Van de Vondervoort & Hamlin, 2018). The current work asks why children experience happiness from giving, focusing on two possible sources—the experience of vicarious-joy (Study 1) and being responsible for a generous action (Study 2).
Vicarious-joy is the shared experience of happiness upon witnessing the happiness of a beneficiary (Morelli, Lieberman, & Zaki, 2015). Critically, a person must be able to see the positive emotion of a beneficiary to experience vicarious-joy. In Study 1, to test whether children’s happiness from giving is due to vicarious-joy, forty-eight 5-year-olds allocated resources in two different conditions—one in which the recipient was present and viewable and one in which the recipient was not (in a counterbalanced order). Participants’ expressions in the two conditions were rated by coders blind to condition. Participants were significantly happier after giving resources when they could see the recipient getting the resources than when they could not see the recipient, F(1,46)=12.40, p<.001, suggesting that children’s emotional reward from giving is, in part, rooted in vicarious-joy.
Critically, vicarious-joy can be experienced even when one was not responsible for a generous act. Since vicarious-joy is the happiness one experiences upon witnessing the beneficiary’s happiness, it is not necessary for one to be the generous actor in order to reap the emotional rewards. Thus, if happiness serves to reward and promote children’s generosity, children should be rewarded for performing generous acts beyond their experience of vicarious-joy. In Study 2, to test whether children’s happiness from giving is due to being responsible for a generous action, forty-eight 5-year-olds allocated resources to another child and watched an experimenter allocate resources (in a counterbalanced order). Coders rated participants’ expressions during the two conditions. Participants were significantly happier when they gave compared to when they watched someone else give, F(1,46)=12.23, p=.001, suggesting that children’s emotional reward from giving is, in part, rooted in being responsible for a generous act.
These findings indicate that children experience happiness from giving because they can empathize with the happiness of a beneficiary and they are responsible for a generous act. While even toddlers are rewarded from witnessing someone helped compared to someone in need (Hepach et al., 2012), the current work specifies that vicarious-joy is the reason why (the critical difference here was whether or not the child could see the benefit). Moreover, 5-year-olds here were most happy from seeing the beneficiary of their own generous act. It is logical that children would be more likely to experience happiness while seeing the positivity of a beneficiary when they were responsible for the generous action if emotional reward from giving serves to reward and promote children’s own generous behavior.

Authors

• Anne Fast, Western Washington University
  Presenting Author

• Kristina Olson, University of Washington
  Non-Presenting Author