Ricerc@Sapienza

We investigated the relations between anticipation of sadness for excluded peers, sympathy, and prosocial behavior in a sample of 127 Italian preschoolers (Mage= 4.84 years, SD = 0.85). Children attributed emotions to hypothetical excluded peers who exhibited withdrawn versus aggressive behavior, and these attributions were coded for the presence and intensity of sadness. Teachers rated children’s sympathy and prosocial behavior via questionnaire. In general, children attributed more sadness to the withdrawn excluded peer than the aggressive excluded peer.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents threats, such as severe disease and economic hardship, to people of different ages. These threats can also be experienced asymmetrically across age groups, which could lead to generational differences in behavioral responses to reduce the spread of the disease.

Although literature on happiness has focused largely on adults and adolescents, research interest on subjective well-being in children has increasingly grown in recent years. We investigated the contributions of the self-esteem, loneliness, and friendship variables to children’s happiness after taking into account the moderating effects of gender and age. The children responded to questionnaires evaluating their happiness, friendship variables, social self-efficacy, loneliness, and self-esteem whereas the parents reported the children’s behavioral problems and prosocial behavior.

The present study aimed at investigating the mediating role of social conduct in the relation between theory of mind (ToM) and sociometric peer status. One hundred and seventy-seven 8- to 11-year-olds filled out a battery encompassing advanced ToM skill, verbal ability and sociometric peer status, expressed in terms of social preference and social impact. A questionnaire on students' externalizing, internalizing and prosocial behaviors was administered to teachers. Only externalizing behavior mediated the link between ToM and social impact, controlling for age, gender, and verbal ability.

The study was designed to verify which cognitive brain types and behaviors in classroom predicted the intention to volunteer to become a peer buddy for a student with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Five hundred and sixteen adolescents attending the first grade of public high schools were enrolled. Gender-related differences were discussed according to the empathizing-systemizing theory. As expected, empathy and prosocial behavior predicted volunteering in ASD intervention. We conclude that the selection of peers as intervention agents should require more informative sources.

A limited number of studies has found that Prosocial Behavior (PB; i.e. voluntary actions aimed to benefit others, like helping, consoling, donating; Eisenberg, et al., 2006) was associated with academic achievement across adolescence (e.g., Gerbino et al., 2018; Wentzel, 1993). It was hypothesized that prosocial adolescents may be more motivated and engaged with school, because they experience a supportive and accepting environment (e.g., Jennings & Greenberg 2009).

Objective: Researchers have demonstrated the prediction of academic functioning by children’s pro-social behavior (PB).
The goal of our study was to examine the contribution of adolescents’ PB for middle and senior high school grades after controlling for stability of achievement and for intelligence, Big Five traits, and sociodemographic variables (i.e., sex and socioeconomic status).

To examine whether the cultural normativeness of parents' beliefs and behaviors moderates the links between those beliefs and behaviors and youths' adjustment, mothers, fathers, and children (N = 1,298 families) from 12 cultural groups in 9 countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States) were interviewed when children were, on average, 10 years old and again when children were 12 years old.

The donation of human organ and tissues is a prosocial behavior which is particularly
relevant for our society. Although these kinds of donation usually do not entail financial
costs nor painful procedures for the donors, adequate supplies to meet the demand for
these materials are rarely achieved by national health systems and this calls for more
research aimed at targeting the best behavioral intervention for promoting donation.
One problematic regards the proportion of eligible donors which are usually a small