Browsing by Author "Svetlova, Margarita"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Individual differences in toddlers' social understanding and prosocial behavior: disposition or socialization?
    (Front Psychol, 2015) Gross, Rebekkah L; Drummond, Jesse; Satlof-Bedrick, Emma; Waugh, Whitney E; Svetlova, Margarita; Brownell, Celia A
    We examined how individual differences in social understanding contribute to variability in early-appearing prosocial behavior. Moreover, potential sources of variability in social understanding were explored and examined as additional possible predictors of prosocial behavior. Using a multi-method approach with both observed and parent-report measures, 325 children aged 18-30 months were administered measures of social understanding (e.g., use of emotion words; self-understanding), prosocial behavior (in separate tasks measuring instrumental helping, empathic helping, and sharing, as well as parent-reported prosociality at home), temperament (fearfulness, shyness, and social fear), and parental socialization of prosocial behavior in the family. Individual differences in social understanding predicted variability in empathic helping and parent-reported prosociality, but not instrumental helping or sharing. Parental socialization of prosocial behavior was positively associated with toddlers' social understanding, prosocial behavior at home, and instrumental helping in the lab, and negatively associated with sharing (possibly reflecting parents' increased efforts to encourage children who were less likely to share). Further, socialization moderated the association between social understanding and prosocial behavior, such that social understanding was less predictive of prosocial behavior among children whose parents took a more active role in socializing their prosociality. None of the dimensions of temperament was associated with either social understanding or prosocial behavior. Parental socialization of prosocial behavior is thus an important source of variability in children's early prosociality, acting in concert with early differences in social understanding, with different patterns of influence for different subtypes of prosocial behavior.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Linking Parenting Styles to Parent and Child Behaviors in a Joint Task
    (2019-04) Kohler, Celia
    This study explored: 1) the link between parenting questionnaire data and parenting behaviors in a parent-child play task, with the aim of creating a short behavioral task to more sensitively empirically measure parenting; 2) how parenting measures relate to child behaviors, including child helping and compliance/noncompliance; and 3) how different contexts, namely the presence or absence of time pressure during a joint task, affect parent-child relationships. Thirty-five 3- to 4.5-year-old children and one of their parents participated in four behavioral tasks, and questionnaire data were collected for each parent-child dyad. Authoritative parenting style scores were related to increases in the amount of commands and praise used during the behavioral tasks, as well as a decrease in the number of questions used. Authoritarian parenting style scores were related to an increase in the amount of negative feedback used. Permissive parenting style scores were not significantly related to any parenting behaviors. No parent measures were found to be significantly related to child behaviors, possibly due to the child measures not being sensitive enough. When comparing how parents and children behaved under time pressure, parents used less praise, less questions, more commands, and more negative feedback, whereas children complied significantly less on average under pressure. Findings suggest that the dyadic relationship is affected by the context in which it is found, and that using behavioral measures leads to a more robust understanding of individual parenting practices and effects. Future directions and improvements to the current study are discussed.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Mine or yours? Development of sharing in toddlers in relation to ownership understanding.
    (Child Dev, 2013-05) Brownell, Celia A; Iesue, Stephanie S; Nichols, Sara R; Svetlova, Margarita
    To examine early developments in other-oriented resource sharing, fifty-one 18- and 24-month-old children were administered 6 tasks with toys or food that could be shared with an adult playmate who had none. On each task the playmate communicated her desire for the items in a series of progressively more explicit cues. Twenty-four-month-olds shared frequently and spontaneously. Eighteen-month-olds shared when given multiple opportunities and when the partner provided enough communicative support. Younger children engaged in self-focused and hypothesis-testing behavior in lieu of sharing more often than did older children. Ownership understanding, separately assessed, was positively associated with sharing and negatively associated with non-sharing behavior, independent of age and language ability.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Putting together phylogenetic and ontogenetic perspectives on empathy.
    (Dev Cogn Neurosci, 2012-01) Decety, Jean; Svetlova, Margarita
    The ontogeny of human empathy is better understood with reference to the evolutionary history of the social brain. Empathy has deep evolutionary, biochemical, and neurological underpinnings. Even the most advanced forms of empathy in humans are built on more basic forms and remain connected to core mechanisms associated with affective communication, social attachment, and parental care. In this paper, we argue that it is essential to consider empathy within a neurodevelopmental framework that recognizes both the continuities and changes in socioemotional understanding from infancy to adulthood. We bring together neuroevolutionary and developmental perspectives on the information processing and neural mechanisms underlying empathy and caring, and show that they are grounded in multiple interacting systems and processes. Moreover, empathy in humans is assisted by other abstract and domain-general high-level cognitive abilities such as executive functions, mentalizing and language, as well as the ability to differentiate another's mental states from one's own, which expand the range of behaviors that can be driven by empathy.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Socialization of Early Prosocial Behavior: Parents' Talk about Emotions is Associated with Sharing and Helping in Toddlers.
    (Infancy, 2013-01-01) Brownell, Celia A; Svetlova, Margarita; Anderson, Ranita; Nichols, Sara R; Drummond, Jesse
    What role does socialization play in the origins of prosocial behavior? We examined one potential socialization mechanism, parents' discourse about others' emotions with very young children in whom prosocial behavior is still nascent. Two studies are reported, one of sharing in 18- and 24-month-olds (n = 29), and one of instrumental and empathy-based helping in 18- and 30-month-olds (n = 62). In both studies, parents read age-appropriate picture books to their children and the content and structure of their emotion-related and internal state discourse were coded. Results showed that children who helped and shared more quickly and more often, especially in tasks that required more complex emotion understanding, had parents who more often asked them to label and explain the emotions depicted in the books. Moreover, it was parents' elicitation of children's talk about emotions rather than parents' own production of emotion labels and explanations that explained children's prosocial behavior, even after controlling for age. Thus, it is the quality, not the quantity, of parents' talk about emotions with their toddlers that matters for early prosocial behavior.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Three- and 5-year-old children's understanding of how to dissolve a joint commitment.
    (Journal of experimental child psychology, 2019-08) Kachel, Ulrike; Svetlova, Margarita; Tomasello, Michael
    When young children form a joint commitment with a partner, they understand that this agreement generates obligations. In this study, we investigated whether young children understand that joint commitments, and their associated obligations, may likewise be dissolved by agreement. The participants (3- and 5-year-olds; N = 144) formed a joint commitment with a puppet to play a collaborative game. In one condition, the puppet asked permission to break off and the children agreed; in a second condition, the puppet notified the children of his or her leaving; and in a third condition, the puppet just left abruptly. Children at both ages protested more and waited longer for the puppet's return (and said that the puppet deserved scolding and no prize at the end) when the puppet left abruptly than in the other two conditions (with "asking permission" leading to the least protest of all). Overall, 3-year-olds protested more, and waited longer for the partner's return, than 5-year-olds. Preschool children understand that the obligations of a joint commitment may be dissolved by agreement or, to a lesser degree, by notification.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Three-Year-Olds' Reactions to a Partner's Failure to Perform Her Role in a Joint Commitment.
    (Child Dev, 2017-05-15) Kachel, Ulrike; Svetlova, Margarita; Tomasello, Michael
    When children make a joint commitment to collaborate, obligations are created. Pairs of 3-year-old children (N = 144) made a joint commitment to play a game. In three different conditions the game was interrupted in the middle either because: (a) the partner child intentionally defected, (b) the partner child was ignorant about how to play, or (c) the apparatus broke. The subject child reacted differently in the three cases, protesting normatively against defection (with emotional arousal and later tattling), teaching when the partner seemed to be ignorant, or simply blaming the apparatus when it broke. These results suggest that 3-year-old children are competent in making appropriate normative evaluations of intentions and obligations of collaborative partners.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemOpen Access
    To Snack or Not to Snack? Children's Self-Regulation in the Presence of Peers
    (2019-04-23) Caplin, Phoebe
    As established by Walter Mischel through his famous “Marshmallow Task”, children around the age of 4 are able to put of a current, small reward in favor of a later and greater reward (Mischel & Mischel, 1983; Mischel, W. & Ebbesen, 1970; Mischel, 1972). However, little research has examined how children playing the game with peers changes how children delay gratification. The current study aims to explore how the opportunity for collaboration on a delay of gratification task affects children’s ability to do so. Forty-eight children (mean age 3.94 years) were presented with a delay of gratification task in which they were shown a peer over “Skype” (a pre-recorded video) and were told either that they were playing in parallel (independent outcomes) or that if either child ate their snack, both would not be able to obtain a second snack (interdependent outcomes). Counter to the hypotheses, children who were given the interdependent instructions were more successful when watching an impatient peer who did not delay gratification, and children who were given independent instructions were more successful when watching a patient peer. The results and future implications are discussed.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Toddlers' costly helping in three societies.
    (Journal of experimental child psychology, 2020-03-25) Corbit, John; Callaghan, Tara; Svetlova, Margarita
    Over the second and third years of life, toddlers begin to engage in helping even when it comes at a personal cost. During this same period, toddlers gain experience of ownership, which may influence their tendency to help at a cost. Whereas costly helping has been studied in Western children, who have ample access to resources, the emergence of costly helping has not been examined in societies where children's experience with ownership is varied and access to resources is scarce. The current study compared the development of toddlers' costly and non-costly helping in three societies within Canada, India, and Peru that differ in these aspects of children's early social experience. In two conditions, 16- to 36-month-olds (N = 100) helped an experimenter by giving either their own items (Costly condition) or the experimenter's items (Non-costly condition). Children's tendency to help increased with age in the Non-costly condition across all three societies. In the Costly condition, in Canada children's tendency to help increased with age, in Peru children's helping remained stable across age, and in India children's level of helping decreased with age. Thus, whereas we replicate the findings that non-costly helping appears to develop synchronously across diverse societies, costly helping may depend on children's early society-specific experiences. We discuss these findings in relation to children's early ownership experience and access to resources, factors that may account for the divergent patterns in the development of costly helping across these societies.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Toddlers' prosocial behavior: from instrumental to empathic to altruistic helping.
    (Child Dev, 2010-11) Svetlova, Margarita; Nichols, Sara R; Brownell, Celia A
    The study explored how the meaning of prosocial behavior changes over toddlerhood. Sixty-five 18- and 30-month-olds could help an adult in 3 contexts: instrumental (action based), empathic (emotion based), and altruistic (costly). Children at both ages helped readily in instrumental tasks. For 18-month-olds, empathic helping was significantly more difficult than instrumental helping and required greater communication from the adult about her needs. Altruistic helping, which involved giving up an object of the child's own, was the most difficult for children at both ages. Findings suggest that over the 2nd year of life, prosocial behavior develops from relying on action understanding and explicit communications to understanding others' emotions from subtle cues. Developmental trajectories of social-cognitive and motivational components of early helping are discussed.