Emotions in the Context of Children’s Prosocial Attention and Interactions

Humans are extraordinary prosocial beings. No other Great Ape species invests a comparable amount of time and resources into building, maintaining, and repairing social relationships. The degree to which small-scale communities and large-scale societies embrace the human capacity for prosociality and capitalise on human-unique forms of cooperation is variable. The cross-cultural constant, however, is that each individual child undergoes a critical period of prosocial development in the first four years of life. During this period children’s emotions undergo a culture-specific transformation through children’s interactions with adults, siblings, and same-age peers. Studying how emotions shape young children’s social interactions, how they allow children to maintain and repair social relationships, is the developmental psychologist’s study of the psychological origins of human prosociality. This thesis is about studying examples of such so-called prosocial emotions. The main question of the current thesis is: How do emotions regulate children’s social inter- actions and relationships in early ontogeny? Addressing this question requires the assessment of both the internal mechanisms (attention and physiological arousal) as well as the expression (in behaviour or body language) of emotions in young children’s social interactions. At first, I provide a theoretical basis for studying the regulatory function of prosocial emotions in the first four years of children’s development. I suggest that children’s developing prosociality progresses through two distinct phases, one which shapes their attention and physiological arousal to others’ needs in the first two years of life, and subsequently a second phase during which children’s prosocial behaviour emerges and is increasingly regulated by emotions. In contrast to previous work, such a study of emotions as underlying early prosocial development requires broadening the suite of methods through which emotions are objectively