Responding to Fear in Others Predicts Prosocial Behavior in Infancy

• In Event: 2-142 - Predictors and Outcomes of Early Empathy and Prosocial Development: Findings from Longitudinal Investigations

Integrative Statement

Prosocial behavior is considered a key feature of cooperation across human societies. Yet, the tendency to engage in prosocial action varies considerably between individuals, ranging from highly prosocial kidney donors to extremely antisocial psychopaths. There is a body of research (see Marsh, 2015) showing that variability in prosocial behavior is systematically linked to differences in our responsiveness to others in distress, especially when displaying fear. The current study tested the hypothesis that this link between responding to fear in others and prosocial behavior exists from early in human ontogeny.
For this purpose, the current study focused on the earliest ages when sensitivity to fearful faces and prosocial behavior first emerge in development. In a longitudinal design with 63 infants, we examined attentional and brain responses to emotional facial expressions (fear, anger, and happiness) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and eyetracking at 7 months of age and prosocial behavior at 14 months of age by adapting an established instrumental helping task (Warneken & Tomasello, 2007). Our analysis of the eyetracking data revealed that prosocial behavior at 14 months was predicted by infants’ attention to fearful faces, but not happy or angry faces. Specifically, infants who showed heightened initial attention to (i.e., prolonged first look) followed by greater disengagement (i.e., reduced attentional looking bias over 15 seconds) from fearful faces at 7 months, displayed greater prosocial behavior at 14 months of age (see Figure 1). In line with this pattern observed among infants in the current study, previous research shows that prosocial behavior likely arises from a combination of initial shared distress with (concern for) the other, followed by a down-regulation of one’s own distress (de Waal & Preston, 2017). Moreover, our fNIRS data show that infants’ attentional bias to fearful faces and their prosocial behavior were predicted by brain responses in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), providing further evidence for the notion that control or regulatory processes contribute to individual differences in prosocial action.
Confirming our hypothesis, the current results suggest that the tendency to engage prosocially is linked to responding to others in distress from early in human development. This finding supports accounts that assign a critical role to care-based responding in the emergence of cooperative behavior. Our results further show that variability in the tendency to sensitively respond to others in fear emerges early in infancy and manifests itself in differences in the recruitment of prefrontal brain processes linked to control or regulatory processes. These findings critically advance our understanding of the emergence of prosociality by identifying responsiveness to fear in others as an early precursor contributing to variability in prosocial behavior.

Authors

• Tobias Grossmann, University of Virginia
  Presenting Author

• Manuela Missana, Leipzig University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kathleen M Krol, University of Virginia
  Non-Presenting Author