How Non-Refugee Children Feel About Refugee Children: Emotions and Links to Prosocial Behavior

• In Event: 2-124 - Children’s Emotions and Prosocial Behavior in the Context of Intergroup Relations

Integrative Statement

The world has been witnessing a global epidemic where families are being forced to migrate (i.e., refugees) due to their country’s unstable and dangerous political states. Unfortunately, refugees continue to experience challenges as they adapt to their new environment (Hadfield et al., 2017). Refugee children, in particular, may struggle to make new friends and be accepted by their peers. Examining how non-refugee children feel about refugee children may shed light on how refugees are integrated into their new peer groups. Emotions are important to examine as they are considered primary motivators of children’s other-oriented, prosocial behaviors (Malti & Dys, 2018). Here, we explore non-refugee children’s feelings of pride, guilt, and sympathy toward non-refugee and refugee children, and how their feelings relate to their prosocial behavior.

Preliminary data from an ethnically diverse sample of 5-, 8-, and 11-year-olds (N = 50) and their caregivers from a city in Canada were used. Children were shown three hypothetical vignettes about non-refugee (in-group) and refugee (out-group) peers in the context of harm that aimed to elicit feelings of pride, guilt, and sympathy (see Table 1). These vignettes were created based on our previous work and well-validated measures (citation blinded) and were piloted prior to use. Following each vignette, children were asked to report how they would feel—reports of pride, guilt and sympathy were coded as 1 and all other emotions were coded as 0. Prosocial behavior was measured using a donation task (Knight et al., 1994), where the child was given the choice to donate (or not) chocolate coins to a poor refugee child. Parents also reported on children’s prosocial behavior using a subscale of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (alpha = .65; Goodman, 1997).

Figure 1 displays the frequencies of each emotion reported by condition. Children felt marginally lower levels of pride in the refugee context compared to the non-refugee context, χ2(1) = 2.83, p = .09. Next, to examine how children’s emotions related to their prosocial behavior, we ran two hierarchical linear regressions. We included age and gender as our control variables at step 1, our emotion variables and our condition variable at step 2, and emotion by condition interactions at step 3. In the first model, we found that, regardless of condition, sympathy (but not pride nor guilt) positively related to donation (b = 2.25, SE = 1.08, p < .05, Δ R2 = .09). In the second model, there was a pride by condition interaction (b = .73, SE = .31, p < .05), where high pride in the refugee condition was related to higher parent-reported prosocial behavior (b = .65, SE = .22, p < .01, Δ R2 = .10; see Figure 1).

These findings suggest that children may have difficulty accepting refugee children as they felt slightly less pride when behaving prosocially toward refugee peers. Further, our findings extend previous work (e.g., Ongley & Malti, 2014) by showing that sympathy and pride are important emotions as they may be key motivators of prosocial behavior toward refugee children.

Authors

• Joanna Peplak, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Tina Malti, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author