Commentary: A construct divided: prosocial behavior as helping, sharing, and comforting subtypes

Research over the decades has shown clearly that human children act pro-socially starting from very early in life. In her recent paper, Dunfield (2014) has contributed to this wealth of research by proposing a framework in which to understand children's pro-social behaviors. Here, I aim to draw attention to some drawbacks of this framework as well as suggest directions for future research. According to Dunfield's (2014) framework, pro-social behavior comprises of three subtypes: helping, sharing and comforting. The negative state that a pro-social behavior targets is what forms the basis of this categorization. Accordingly, alleviating a negative state marked by an instrumental need requires helping behavior, while an unmet material desire requires sharing behavior, and emotional distress requires comforting (Dunfield, 2014). Identifying these subtypes is helpful for conceptual clarity, for disentangling the socio-cognitive skills underlying pro-social behaviors, and for a complete understanding of the developmental trajectory of pro-sociality. One concern, however, regards ecological validity. How distinct are the three subtypes of pro-social behavior really? Imagine a daily life event, where a friend loses their wallet. You may respond to their negative state by helping them look for their wallet, by sharing some of your money with them, or by comforting them and showing sympathy. In such real-life examples, the negative states are largely intermeshed and thus, there is often more than one " right " way to respond. This is particularly so when considering the interference of emotional distress, which is nearly impossible to detach from instrumental needs or unmet material desires. In fact, most empirical studies have incorporated emotional distress while testing helping and/or sharing behavior (but see Kenward and Gredebäck, 2013). The widely used out-of-reach instrumental helping tasks (e. Brownell et al., 2013a) rely on linguistic and/or facial cues that indicate distress, such as the experimenter uttering " Oops! " or " Oh! " to mark the accidental nature of the action, and hence, her need for help. Only a few studies (Vaish et al., 2009; Newton et al., 2014; Chiarella and Poulin-Dubois, 2015) have investigated whether the experimenter maintaining a neutral expression in face of a negative event would influence children's subsequent helping behavior. Yet, the emotion expression manipulation in these studies was done for events preceding the pro-social task; the negative emotional cues were still provided during the pro-social task. Hence, although infants acted equally pro-socially in neutral expression conditions, the relative effects of emotional distress …