Observing prosociality and talent: the emotional characteristics and behavioral outcomes of elevation and admiration in 6.5- to 8.5-year-old children

Abstract

Helping and seeing others being helped elicits positive emotions in young children but little is known about the nature of these emotions, especially in middle childhood. Here we examined the specific emotional characteristics and behavioral outcomes of two closely related other-praising moral emotions: elevation and admiration. We exposed 182 6.5- to 8.5-year-old children living in New Zealand, to an elevation- and admiration-inducing video clip. Afterwards children's emotion experiences and prosocial behaviour was measured. Findings revealed higher levels of happiness, care, and warmth after seeing prosociality in others (elevation condition) and higher levels of upliftment after seeing talent in others (admiration condition). We found no differences in prosocial behavior between the elevation and admiration conditions. This is the first study to assess elevation in childhood and offers a novel paradigm to investigate the role of moral emotions as potential motivators underlying helping.

Keywords: admiration; elevation; middle childhood; prosocial development; prosocial emotions.

Figure 1

Circle scale. Circle scale for children’s emotion self-report. The small circle (left) was introduced as not feeling the emotion at all and the big circle (right) was introduced as feeling a huge amount of the feeling. The scores applied ranged from 1 (not at all) to 7 (a huge amount).

Figure 2

Contrasts between baseline and test emotion self-report means (±SE) for each condition. Figure shows baseline and test emotion self-report mean (±SE) differences across conditions. The Bonferroni correction was used to control for multiple testing (0.05/2=0.025). SE, standard error. ^*P < 0.025, ^**p < 0.01.

Figure 3

Survival modeling curves for each condition. Figure shows the probability of children staying engaged in the rice game over time for the elevation and admiration condition.

Figure 4

Emotions from left to right: happy, sad, uplifted (“This face is feeling uplifted, for example, a child might feel uplifted when they have a fun playdate with a friend.”), warm and fuzzy (“This face is feeling warm and fuzzy, for example, a child might feel warm and fuzzy when they get a big hug from their mum or dad.”), caring (“This face is feeling caring. A child might feel caring when they see a friend crying because they hurt themselves.”). Source: https://mondaymandala.com/printable-emojis/.