Prosocial and antisocial behaviour - SED2

Question 1

What is prosocial behaviour?

Answer 1

behaviour that benefits another at a cost to the self

Question 2

What does evolution theory suggest in terms of prosocial behaviour? (3)

Answer 2

• genes are selfish and just want to replicate themselves
• helping your own child or family member therefore makes sense
• helping others doesn’t make sense

Question 3

What is reciprocity?

Answer 3

you may help someone because they will likely help you in return, so you gain something from it

Question 4

what is indirect reciprocity?

Answer 4

help someone so someone observing will see you helping and then be more likely to help you, even though they weren’t helped by you themselves

Question 5

Are 18 month infants helpful when an adult needs help?

Answer 5

yes - helpful across many situations

Question 6

What psychological mechanisms motivate us to be prosocial? (3)

Answer 6

• empathy
• sympathy
• guilt

Question 7

What evidence is there for empathy in infants?

Answer 7

they cry when they hear another infant crying - more for another baby’s cries than their own cries recorded

Question 8

What was found when looking at whether infants respond to their mothers’ distress (sympathy)? (3)

Answer 8

• infants showed concern for others
• prosocial responding increased over the second year of life
• became more diverse with age - from purely physical comfort to a wider range of options

Question 9

What was found in the study where an experimenter lost her balloon in front of 18 month olds? What is this evidence for?

Answer 9

• more likely to help if they had previously observed someone being mean to the experimenter
• evidence for sympathy

Question 10

What happened when 2 and 3 year old children vs experimenter ‘accidentally’ knocked a tower down?

Answer 10

• 3 year olds more likely to help if the mishap was their fault
• 2 year olds sometimes repaired damage, but not more likely if it was their fault

Question 11

What were children prone to guilt in the 5th grade less and more likely to do?

Answer 11

• less arrested, convicted, incarcerated, drugs in adolescence
• more safe sex

Question 12

How are parents suggested to influence children’s prosocial behaviour? (5)

Answer 12

• modelling of empathic and responsive behaviour
• direct instruction
• warm and sensitive response to child’s needs
• discussion of others’ emotions and mental states
• variety of emotion and mental state vocabulary

Question 13

What does parent mental state talk predict?

Answer 13

• emotion-based helping
• not simple goal-directed helping

Question 14

What is relational aggression?

Answer 14

behaviour that intentionally upsets another person

Question 15

What did aggression in 3 and 4 year old children relate to in Crick et al’s rating of peers study? (3)

Answer 15

• low prosocial behaviour
• rejected by peers
• high negative emotion = more aggression

Question 16

What was found when 12 year old children’s antisocial behaviour was compared to their instability at age 3?

Answer 16

lack of control at age 3 = more antisocial in adolescence

Question 17

What was poor emotion regulation at age 3 related to in adulthood?

Answer 17

• respond to everyday frustrations with more negative emotions
• experienced negative emotions more often

Question 18

How can peers influence anti-social behaviour? (2)

Answer 18

• may lead friends into anti-social activity
• negative social experiences can lead to a hostile attribution bias

Question 19

what are children who spend a lot of time watching TV more prone to?

Answer 19

aggression

Question 20

What did a small subsample of boys who were antisocial in childhood and adolescence have? (2)

Answer 20

• difficult temperaments age 3
• impairments in verbale functioning and mental flexibility

Question 21

What is extreme anti-social behaviour in childhood and adolescence related to?

Answer 21

attention deficit disorder

Question 22

What physical thing do antisocial males have? What is this associated with?

Answer 22

• lower resting heart rate
• lower guilt and shame

Question 23

What are the callous and unemotional traits? (3)

Answer 23

• limited empathy
• a lack of guilt
• shallow affect

Question 24

What was found in the twin study about callous and unemotional traits?

Answer 24

• high levels = strongly heritable
• lower levels = environmental factors explain

Question 25

What is an aspect of callous-unemotional traits and how can that be used?

Answer 25

• they are malleable - respond to warm parenting, not negative parenting
• tailor interventions to train in emotional literacy and emotional recognition

Question 26

What is moral judgement?

Answer 26

the ability to distinguish right from wrong

Question 27

What is moral behaviour?

Answer 27

the tendency to act on the distinction between right and wrong and so bring positive benefits to others

Question 28

What are moral emotions?

Answer 28

the tendency to feel pride in virtuous conduct and guilt or shame over conduct that violates one’s own moral principles

Question 29

What did Piaget find about how children judge intentions vs outcomes?

Answer 29

• younger children tend to judge the negative outcome more harshly
• older children judge the negative intention more harshly

Question 30

When does the ability to reason moral conflicts develop according to Piaget?

Answer 30

10

Question 31

What are Kohlberg’s 3 levels of moral development?

Answer 31

• preconventional morality
• conventional morality
• postconventional morality

Question 32

What evidence is there for Kohlberg’s moral development theory?

Answer 32

longitudinal studies find the percentage of participants with lower-level reasoning decreased with age and higher-level reasoning increased

Question 33

What are some critiques of Kohlberg’s stages? (4)

Answer 33

• higher levels of cognitive development don’t automatically lead to more moral actions
• the samples were not representative
• stage 6 is individualist (own set of morals, not group)
• tasks focus on verbally demanding dilemmas

Question 34

What do infants do when they see a shape helping another up a hill and a different shape pushing it down the hill?

Answer 34

they reach for the helpful one first

Question 35

What do infants do when a puppet is helped or attacked when the puppet is similar to them (likes same food) or different?

Answer 35

• 9-14 month olds prefer puppets who harm those dissimilar to them
• they prefer puppets who help those similar to them

Question 36

What do children do when asked if they would save the lives of 10 dogs vs one human? What does this suggest?

Answer 36

save the dogs
they are not speciesist so this is a socially acquired ideology