Examining the influence of shyness on children’s helping and comforting behaviour

IntroductionShy 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 socialengagement demands and complexity, factors that have been conflated in past research.MethodsWe 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).ResultsMost 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.DiscussionThus, 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

Flexible Design and Accommodation Support

Inclusion is critically important in all contexts. The Excel spreadsheet we created below (download to view in full) is intended to build capacity for instructors in thinking about accommodations and essential learning requirements before a course begins. This document is not intended to be exhaustive and meeting accessibility needs requires ongoing consideration. To facilitate this we have added this form to an open Google Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HgEqGZJEKJuuQbSH0hx1dI7kKBxC_ifcKQ0ma7AD1XY/edit?usp=sharing We invite users to visit the sheet to contribute their own ideas. We hope this is a helpful resource for proactive planning for flexible course design

Teaching Animal Learning and Cognition: Adapting to the Online Environment

The number of online courses offered by institutions of higher education has been increasing sizably in the 21st century. As we write this paper in 2020, though, the prevalence of online courses is taking an unexpected upturn as the global COVID-19 pandemic has led to a sudden and near universal transition of in-person courses to remote, online delivery. The specific goal of this paper is to share, in a timely manner, our experiences and insights from teaching an online course on animal learning and cognition for the last seven years. A broader goal is to provide a resource that not only benefits instructors in the present circumstances but also supports course development, review, and redesign – for both on-campus and online curricula – into the future. To these ends, we discuss course organization, learning outcomes, activities, assessments, and considerations such as accessibility and academic integrity. We end with a ‘call for community’ of instructors who share teaching resources, and we hope that this paper, and its associated supplemental materials, may serve to support this endeavor. This paper has been accepted for publication at the open-access journal Comparative Cognition and Behavior Reviews (https://comparative-cognition-and-behavior-reviews.org/vol15_kuhlmeier_karasewich_olmstead/) we've included the preprint in the files below

Getting Help for Others: An Examination of Indirect Helping in Young Children

When young children recruit others to help a person in need, media reports often treat it as a remarkable event. Yet it is unclear how commonly children perform this type of prosocial behavior and what forms of social understanding, cognitive abilities, and motivational factors promote or discourage it. In this study, 48 3- to 4-year-old children could choose between two actors to retrieve an out-of-reach object for a third person; during this event, one actor was physically unable to provide help. Nearly all of children’s responses appropriately incorporated the actors’ action capacities, indicating that rational prosocial reasoning – the cognitive basis for effective indirect helping – is common at this young age. However, only half of children actually directed an actor to help, suggesting that additional motivational factors constrained their prosocial actions. A behavioral measure of social inhibition and within-task scaffolding that increased children’s personal involvement were both strongly associated with children’s initiation of indirect helping behavior. These results highlight social inhibition and recognizing one’s own potential agency as key motivational challenges that children must overcome to recruit help for others