Poster #62 - Elementary School-Aged Children’s Conversations with their mothers about Prosocial Experiences with Peers

• In Event: Poster Session 06

Abstract

The development of prosocial abilities and behaviours (i.e., actions performed to meet the needs of others) may both reflect and foster empathetic concern for others and an understanding of others’ needs and how to meet them (Spinrad & Gal, 2018; Zaki & Ochsner, 2012). Such prosocial learning can occur within parent-child conversations, which provide opportunities to explore the nuances of prosocial actions and the importance of asking for and receiving aid (Recchia et al., 2014). Moreover, these conversations can highlight the ways in which different perspectives (i.e., that of the actor of prosociality who helps, versus the person the target who is helped) may inform children’s understanding of goals, consequences, and lessons to be learned (Calderón-Tena et al., 2011; Nadler, 2015). Examining these aspects of conversations can thus illuminate processes of prosocial socialization.
This study explored the similarities and differences between parent-child conversations that focused on a recounted prosocial event where the child either helped someone or was helped. The study was based on a sample of 56 mother-child dyads with children aged 6-7 and 10-11 years old, wherein half of the dyads discussed an event wherein they were the prosocial actor, and the other half were the prosocial target (n = 28 each). Transcripts of the conversations were reliably coded for frequencies of references to prosocial acts, consequences of helping, actors’ reasons for helping, targets’ needs, evaluations of helping, and lessons and insights.
Results revealed that conversations included more references to reasons for helping (e.g., “because you’re a good friend to people”) and evaluations of help (e.g., “I’m proud of you”) when the child was the actor (as shown in Table 1) rather than the target. This may be because prosocial actors have more direct access to their reasons for helping, whereas targets must speculate on why they were helped (Nadler, 2015; Wainryb et al., 2005). Moreover, considering that parents evaluated helping positively, and bearing in mind the conversations’ intention of supporting future prosociality, the higher frequency of evaluations in conversations with prosocial actors could be a byproduct of parents’ goals to praise helpful actions so as to encourage them in their children (Tudge, 2018). In turn, while consequences of help were discussed equally across events, impacts of help for targets (e.g., “I was not nervous anymore”) were discussed more when children were targets of help (as shown in Figure 1), whereas actor-related consequences (e.g., “it made me feel happy to help a friend”) were discussed only somewhat more by actors than targets: while the first pattern may be because targets tend to focus on their own experience, the lack of mirrored finding in the actors could be because prosocial acts involve fulfilling others’ need, which guides people to discuss the one in need more than the self (Weinstein & Ryan, 2010). Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of investigating children’s experiences of both helping others and being helped, and parent-child conversations about these events may make unique contributions to prosocial socialization.

Authors

• Nazila Tolooei, Concordia University
  Presenting Author

• Holly E Recchia, Concordia University

• Gabrielle Leclerc, Université de Montréal (UdeM)

• CECILIA WAINRYB, University of Utah

• Melanie A Dirks, McGill University