This study aimed at examining reciprocal associations among teacher–child interactions, teachers' work engagement, and children's social competence across grade 1. The participants were 51 Finnish teachers 815 children. quality of interactions (emotional support, classroom organization, instructional support) was assessed with the Classroom Assessment Scoring System. In addition, reported their...

The goal of this study was to identify heterogenic longitudinal patterns of change in prosocial behavior from adolescence to early adulthood and their association with change in Big Five Factor (BFF) personality traits from adolescence until early adulthood. Participants were 573 Italian adolescents aged approximately 13 at the first assessment and 21 at the last assessment. Using growth mixtur...

Aggression continues to be a serious problem among children, especially those children who have experienced adverse life events such as maltreatment. However, there are many maltreated children who show resilient functioning. This study investigated potential protective factors (i.e., child prosocial skills, child internalizing well-being, and caregiver well-being) that promoted positive adapta...

The neuropeptide oxytocin has been shown to have prosocial effects in both monkeys and humans, leading to its proposed use as a treatment for social disorders in humans such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The opioid system interacts with the oxytocinergic system in an antagonistic manner, so that inactivation of the opioid system causes an increase in oxytocin levels. In this experiment, we...

Adolescent poverty is associated with increased antisocial and decreased prosocial behaviors. Attenuating these negative effects is relevant for both individual and societal well-being. Research exploring how youth in poverty can escape antisocial behaviors and move toward prosocial behaviors has been limited primarily to risk factors. From a strengths perspective, we sought to understand how a...

A majority of peer victimization research focuses on its associations with negative outcomes, yet efforts to understand possible protective factors that may mitigate these negative outcomes also require attention. The present study was an investigation of the potential moderating effect of prosocial behaviors on loneliness for youth who are peer victimized. Participants were fourth and fifth gr...

This chapter addresses the evolutionary roots of the, by and large, uniquely human capacity for helping other people who are not closely related. It is argued that prosocial tendencies have evolved through natural selection pressures associated with the need to solve critical interdependence problems, which can often be modeled as social dilemmas. Solutions to social dilemmas involve engaging i...

This meta-analytic review of 42 studies covering 8,009 participants (ages 4-20) examines the relation of moral emotion attributions to prosocial and antisocial behavior. A significant association is found between moral emotion attributions and prosocial and antisocial behaviors (d = .26, 95% CI [.15, .38]; d = .39, 95% CI [.29, .49]). Effect sizes differ considerably across studies and this het...