Development of functional network architecture explains changes in children's altruistically motivated helping

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Ferdinand Hoffmann1, Charlotte Grosse Wiesmann2, Tania Singer3

  • 1Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Berlin Institute of Health (BIH), Institute of Medical Psychology, Berlin, Germany.

Developmental Science
|August 12, 2021
PubMed

Insights

Altruistic helping in children increases with age, driven by emotional clarity. This development is linked to enhanced brain connectivity in empathy and executive function networks.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Social Psychology

Background:

  • Prosocial behavior undergoes significant changes during childhood.
  • The motivational underpinnings of altruistic helping remain unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • Investigate the development of altruistically motivated helping in middle childhood.
  • Identify neurocognitive and neuroaffective mechanisms driving this developmental trajectory.

Main Methods:

  • A novel gustatory costly helping task assessed altruistic motivation in 127 children (6-12 years old).
  • Neurocognitive and neuroaffective factors (emotion regulation, emotional clarity, attentional reorienting) were measured via extensive tasks.
  • Functional brain activity and connectivity were assessed using fMRI during an empathy for taste paradigm and at rest.

Main Results:

  • Altruistically motivated helping behavior significantly increased with age.
  • Emotional clarity emerged as the sole developmental factor predicting altruistic helping.
  • Increased emotional clarity correlated with enhanced functional integration between empathy-related networks and fronto-parietal regions during rest.

Conclusions:

  • Emotional clarity is a critical neuroaffective mechanism driving the development of altruistically motivated helping in children.
  • Developmental changes in brain connectivity support the emergence of sophisticated altruistic behaviors.
  • This study isolates a specific neuroaffective pathway crucial for understanding altruism development.

Keywords:
altruistic motivationdevelopmentempathy networkhelpingmiddle childhoodprosocial behaviour

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