Children’s Emotions and Reasoning After Helping In- Versus Out-Group Peers: Links with Dispositional Prosocial Behavior

• In Event: Intergroup Helping during Childhood and Adolescence: Antecedents, Motivations, and Consequences

Abstract

Refugee children experiences many post-migration challenges (Hadfield et al., 2017), such as being accepted by their peers. Examining how non-refugee children feel about refugee children may shed light on how newcomers are included into peer groups. Little research has been done to examine children’s emotions in intergroup contexts, particularly children’s feelings following prosocial acts (e.g., helping; Weller & Lagattuta, 2013). This is surprising because positive ethical emotions (e.g., pride) may function as important motivators for sustained prosocial engagement (Krettenauer & Casey, 2015; Malti et al., 2020). Here, we examine children’s emotions and reasoning following helping an in-group (Canadian) versus out-group (refugee) peer, and how children’s emotions may relate to their dispositional prosocial behavior.
Data from a diverse sample of 6-, 9-, and 12-year-olds (N = 198) and their caregivers from Canada were used. Children were told a hypothetical vignette wherein the protagonist was either a non-refugee (in-group) or a refugee (out-group) peer. The participant was told to imagine that they decided to help the peer with difficult schoolwork instead of going outside for recess. Participants were subsequently asked to report their emotions (including intensities; from 1 = not much to 3 = very much) and their reasoning for their emotions following the act (see Table 1 for coding categories and descriptions). The vignette was designed based on our previously validated measures and was piloted prior to use. Positive emotions (e.g., happiness, pride), neutrality, and negative emotions (e.g., sadness, anger, fear) were binary coded into separate variables and multiplied by reported intensities. Caregivers reported on children’s dispositional prosocial behavior using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (Goodman, 1997).
Figure 1 displays rates of positive, neutral, and negative emotions reported by age group and condition, and Table 1 displays the types of reasoning reported by condition. No between-condition effects were found for emotions nor reasoning; however, age-related differences in the intensity of positive emotions were found in the out-group condition, F(2, 146) = 3.45, p < .05, such that 9- and 12-year-olds reported higher intensities of positive emotions than 6-year-olds (see Figure 1). There was also an age group effect in negative emotions for the out-group condition, F(2, 147) = 5.95, p < .01, such that 9- and 12-year-olds reported lower intensities of negative emotions compared to 6-year-olds. Further, we found that children reported stronger positive emotions when their emotions were grounded in ethical reasoning compared to other reasoning types across both conditions, t(157) = -3.09, p < .01, t(147) = -4.58, p < .001, respectively. Finally, we found that negative emotions in the out-group condition negatively predicted prosocial behavior, b = -.20, SE = 0.91, 95% CI = [-.38, -.02] (no emotion-behavior links were found in the in-group condition).
These findings suggest that children may increasingly feel good about helping out-group refugee peers with age. Further, our findings extend previous work by showing that emotions in prosocial intergroup contexts may be important motivators underlying children’s dispositional prosocial behavior (or lack thereof).

Authors

• Joanna Peplak, University of California - Irvine
  Presenting Author

• Tina Malti, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author