Karasewich Tara A, Hines Cameron, Pinheiro Sylvia G V, Buchenrieder Nina, Dunfield Kristen A, Kuhlmeier Valerie A
Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada.
Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2023 Feb 27;14:1128588. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1128588. eCollection 2023.
Shy children, who tend to feel anxious around others and withdraw from social interactions, are found to be less prosocial than their not-shy peers in some studies, though not in others. To examine the contexts in which shy children may be more or less likely to engage in prosocial behaviour, we compared children's willingness and ability to intervene during in-person tasks that differed in and , factors that have been conflated in past research.
We presented 42, 3.5- to 4.5-year-old children with prosocial problems that varied, in a 2 x 2 within-subjects design, by the type of intervention required (i.e., simple helping or complex comforting) and the source of the problem (i.e., social: within the experimenter's personal space; or object: a target object distanced from her).
Most of the children acted prosocially, with little prompting, in the two helping tasks and in the object-centered comforting task. In contrast, fewer than half of the children acted prosocially in the social-centered comforting task. Shyer children were not less likely to intervene in any of the four tasks, but they were slower to intervene in the object-centred comforting task, in which the experimenter was upset about a broken toy.
Thus, providing social-centered comfort to a recently-introduced adult is challenging for young children, regardless of shyness, though shy children do show hesitancy with object-centered comforting. Further, these findings provide insights into the methodological challenges of disentangling children's prosocial motivation and understanding, and we propose solutions to these challenges for future research.
害羞的孩子往往在他人面前感到焦虑并回避社交互动，一些研究发现他们比不害羞的同龄人更缺乏亲社会行为，不过也有研究得出了不同的结论。为了探究害羞的孩子在哪些情境下更有可能或更不可能参与亲社会行为，我们比较了孩子们在面对面任务中的干预意愿和能力，这些任务在过去的研究中存在混淆的[具体因素1]和[具体因素2]方面有所不同。
我们采用2×2被试内设计，向42名3.5至4.5岁的儿童呈现不同的亲社会问题，这些问题因所需干预类型（即简单帮助或复杂安慰）和问题来源（即社交：在实验者个人空间内；或物体：与她有距离的目标物体）而有所变化。
在两项帮助任务和以物体为中心的安慰任务中，大多数孩子在几乎没有提示的情况下就表现出了亲社会行为。相比之下，在以社交为中心的安慰任务中，只有不到一半的孩子表现出亲社会行为。害羞的孩子在这四项任务中的任何一项中进行干预的可能性并不更低，但他们在以物体为中心的安慰任务中干预得较慢，在该任务中实验者因玩具损坏而心烦意乱。
因此，无论是否害羞，对幼儿来说，为新认识的成年人提供以社交为中心的安慰都具有挑战性，不过害羞的孩子在以物体为中心的安慰方面确实表现出犹豫。此外，这些发现为厘清儿童亲社会动机和理解的方法学挑战提供了见解，我们为未来的研究提出了应对这些挑战的解决方案。
