Poster #60 - Potential Contributors to the Manifestations of Prosocial Creativity in Preschool-Age Children

• In Event: Poster Session 13

Abstract

Introduction
Prosocial behavior is defined as actions intended to benefit others. Prosocial creativity is described as an ability to produce a solution for solving someone’s problem in a novel, effective, original, and convenient way. The internalization of prosocial tendencies in early childhood plays a key role in the lifelong development of social adjustment, peer acceptance, emotional stability, academic achievement, and psychological health. But what are the mechanisms that encourage prosocial tendencies? The main purpose of the current study is to investigate the predictors of prosocial creativity in preschool-age children (3- to 5-year-olds) and explore associations between empathy, prosocial behavior, and personality.

Hypotheses
Age, empathy, and personality were expected to predict prosocial creativity of preschool-age children; empathy and personality were expected to influence the prosocial behavior of preschool-age children via multiple causal pathways.

Study Population
Study participants included children N=122 children (Mage = 3.90, SD = 0.85; range: 3–5 years), who fluently spoke English and were three to five years of age, and their parents who participated in the study from various parts of the USA (Table 1).

Methods
The study was offered both online via Zoom (N= 79) and in-person (N=43). Parental participation specifically consisted of completing 1) a health-check survey (only for lab meetings as the study was conducted during COVID where safety regulations were in place to assure social distancing and safety protocols as required by the institution), 2) a short demographic questionnaire, 3) a short scale survey reflecting on their child’s prosocial behavior (i.e., the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire; Goodman, 1997), 4) a scale about their child’s empathy (i.e., the Griffith Empathy Measure; Dadds et al., 2008), and 5) a scale about their child’s personality (i.e., the M5-PS-35; Grist et al., 2012). Parents received a $20 gift card for participation.
During the meeting, children participated in child-friendly tasks on a computer screen. during 30 minutes More specifically, children participated in activities including 1) a warm-up task, 2) a creativity task (i.e., the Multidimensional Stimulus Fluency Measure; Goodwin & Moran, 1990; Moran et al., 1983), 3) an empathy measurement task (i.e., the Empathy Measure for Preschoolers; Sezov, 2002), 4) a moral judgment task (i.e., Ball et al., 2017), and 5) a prosocial reasoning task (i.e., prosocial decision making and prosocial creativity tasks designed by researchers in the current study), respectively.

Results
In the ordinal logistic regression analysis conducted in SPSS (22.0), prosocial creativity was related to age, creativity, cognitive empathy, and prosocial decision-making. We designed a five-component path model (cognitive empathy, affective empathy, prosocial behavior, conscientiousness, and agreeableness) and examined the hypothesized model using AMOS (26.0). (Arbuckle, 2011). The Path model showed that children’s affective empathy was positively influenced by their cognitive empathy, which leads to more prosocial behavior. In view of the results, the direct and indirect positive effects of the variable on prosocial behavior indicate that cognitive empathy has the greatest influence as a predictor of prosocial behavior scores in the current study.

Authors

• Nahide Gungordu, University of Alabama
  Presenting Author

• Maria Hernandez-Reif