3-229 - The Role of Middle Childhood in Social-Cognitive Development: New Evidence From Behavioral and Neural Studies

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Cognitive and emotional social abilities are invaluable for children’s healthy development. Research has largely concentrated on the preschool years, where infants and toddlers stride into adaptive social behavior. But this early development is followed by further advances in middle childhood (Lagattuta et al., 2015), that have received much less emphasis. What is the role of middle childhood? This symposium brings together scholars investigating social abilities with behavioral and neural methods, to discuss the question of what is it that continues to develop in children’s theory of mind, empathy, and prosocial behavior?
The first two presentations provide evidence that children’s empathy and prosocial behavior gain sophistication with age. The first presentation reveals age-related changes in 4-10-year-olds’ and adults’ willingness to help others with an antisocial past as well as additional development in their reasoning about complex prosocial decisions. The second presentation reveals age differences in 5-10-year-olds’ empathic reactions, showing that sympathy to general vulnerability develops after empathy to current emotions. The next two presentations provide insight on the neural bases for advancements in social abilities. The third presentation elaborates on 7-9-year-olds’ neural markers of attention during moral attributions and prosocial behavior toward in-group and out-group members. The fourth presentation shows that theory-of-mind brain regions show predictive responses during naturalistic movie-viewing in 6-7-year-olds, but not 3-4-year-olds, supporting the notion that social abilities continue to develop during these years. Taken together, these studies point to the importance of middle childhood and the underlying neural processes that engender and refine children’s social development.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chairs

• Lior Abramson, Hebrew university of Jerusalem

• Ariel Knafo-Noam, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Individual Presentations

• If you Harm, Will I Help you? Past Events Bias Children’s and Adults’ Prosocial Decision Making - Presenting Author: Kristin Hansen Lagattuta, University of California, Davis; Non-Presenting Author: Hannah J Kramer, University of California, Davis; Non-Presenting Author: Karen Hjortsvang Lara, University of California, Davis; Non-Presenting Author: Katie Kennedy, University of California, Davis

• Disentangling Sympathy and Empathy in Middle Childhood: Evidence From a Novel Task - Presenting Author: Lior Abramson, Hebrew university of Jerusalem; Non-Presenting Author: Florina Uzefovsky, Ben Gurion University; Non-Presenting Author: Ariel Knafo-Noam, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• Costly Sharing and Moral Cognition in Children: Combining Behavioral Economics, Developmental Psychology and Neuroscience - Presenting Author: Elizabeth Huppert, The University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Jean Decety, The University of Chicago

• Development of Predictive Responses in Social Brain Regions From Early to Middle Childhood - Presenting Author: Hilary Richardson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Non-Presenting Author: Rebecca Saxe, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT