What is the role of empathy and perspective taking on the development of prosocial behavior?

Order Instructions

Hello All, this week we explore social cognition and moral development. Prosocial behavior is an important part of living in a society, social development and even mitigating one’s own response to stress (Raposa et al., 2016). We as therapists can encourage parents to model the prosocial behavior they want to encourage (we can also model these behaviors in our own interactions with parents, adults, children, and families).

This modeling can be done with parents own warm and responsive caregiving. For example, if a child is injured and we stop, hug them, speak to them in a soothing voice and attend to them, they are more likely to model this comforting behavior with others. We can add prosocial play with young children like using their stuffed animals to play “vet clinic” where each animal gets a check-up, a band-aid, a hug, and a sticker. The child can watch as we tend to the first few “patients” and then start caring for them on their own with some affirmations from us.

Similarly, when it comes to moral development, we can gently make children aware of the consequences and effects of their behaviors. So let’s take an example of a young child hitting the family dog, it wouldn’t be effective to just shout at the child, call them “bad,” or give them a consequence like a time-out. It would be more effective to stop and explain in language a child can understand like, “ouch, that hurts the dog’s head, please don’t hit the dog, that hurts the dog and we love him, look how daddy pets the dog” and then demonstrate being gentle with the dog.

References

Raposa, E. B., Laws, H. B., & Ansell, E. B. (2016). Prosocial Behavior Mitigates the Negative Effects of Stress in Everyday Life. Clinical Psychological Science : A journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 4(4), 691–698.

Questions For This Week

1)What is the role of empathy and perspective taking on the development of prosocial behavior?

2)What advice might you give to parents/caregivers who want to develop and encourage prosocial behavior in their children?