Does anyone need help

Girls tended to have higher response accuracies in the two need-of-help related tasks only. Differences between age groups, if assessable, were larger for RTs compared to hit rates. Age differences were larger for the Human-bird-distinction paradigm compared to the help-related paradigms. Thus, even though a formal comparison across the two subsamples of children was not possible, the obtainable result patterns were similar for both subsamples.

Therefore, the reported pattern of results is unlikely to be restricted to highly motivated or unusually advanced children, but seems rather stable. Figure 5. Hit rates and RTs for those children only completing one or two paradigms. N refers to the number of children, n to the number of trials. Table 3. Correlation analyses were conducted to detect systematic relations between children's responses across experimental paradigms.

Correlations of hit rates across paradigms were calculated separately for boys and girls. Figure 6. Correlation of hit rates top and RTs bottom between different paradigms. Each data point corresponds to the mean values for one child. Red circles represent girls, blue ones boys. Correlation patterns differed between girls and boys only for hit rates see upper row A , B and C , but did not for response times RTs, see bottom row, D , E and F.

Red and blue regression lines and adjacent correlation coefficients refer respectively to data of girls and boys. Black regression lines and correlation coefficients, for which emergence of correlations did not differ for girls and boys, refer to data of all children. We were able to further specify what is different in need-of-help recognition for girls compared to boys by splitting data into two subgroups: pictures of humans and pictures of birds. Figure 7. Correlation of hit rates between the two need-of-help recognition paradigms.

Data is shown separately for human- A and bird-depictions B. Red circles refer to girls, blue ones to boys. The bottom row of Figure 6 shows the corresponding scatter plots including correlation coefficients. Thus, children who responded faster did so in all paradigms whatever the demands of the task. These strong associations generalized for human and for bird depictions, for boys as well as for girls.

The correlation analyses provided additional evidence that the abilities captured by children's RTs were not specific to need-of-help content as was the case for response accuracies and its ease of processing, but rather reflected more general abilities of the children, e. Only responses to depictions of humans with an identifiable gender e.

The capacity to identify a situation in which someone needs help is a necessary precondition for initiating helping behavior. It is therefore an important aspect of children's social development. The present study assesses whether previously reported age and gender differences with regard to some aspects of active helping and social perception are also evident in a child's ability to recognize another person's need-of-help.

In this way, we separate need-of-help recognition as an early socio-perceptual process from later processing stages leading to active helping, such as motivation and choosing to help. In a computer-based exploratory study, children were asked to indicate whether someone a human child or a bird shown on a picture was in need of help. We measured two behavioral correlates: response accuracy and RT. Both have been shown to develop throughout childhood in a variety of tasks, including differentiation of emotional stimuli e.

Therefore, a control task was used to provide baseline measures for these response characteristics independently of need-of-help recognition. This control task required children to indicate whether they had seen a human or bird. Importantly, all three experimental paradigms employed the identical visual stimuli in order to ensure that variations in response patterns were attributable to differences in information processing and decision characteristics only—not to differences in stimulus material.

Below we first discuss response accuracy as a measure of need-of-help recognition capacity before turning to children's RTs which are assessed here as an indication of ease of processing and decision.

Overall, high accuracies were observed across all experimental paradigms, providing evidence that the tasks were doable for children in all three age groups: They reliably recognized situations in which a human child or a bird was in need of help and distinguished between humans and birds. Even the somewhat abstract and unrealistic depictions of birds in human-like need-of-help situations did not pose difficulties to this normative population of children aged 5—13 years when it came to recognizing need-of-help content.

The children's need-of-help recognition accuracy increased with age, as would be expected for a variety of differentiation tasks see for example Davidson et al. This was, however, not equally true for boys and girls.

Moreover, age-related increases in hit rates differed systematically between need-of-help related tasks and the Human-bird-distinction task. In both need-of-help recognition tasks, but not in the control Human-bird-distinction task, a clearly higher accuracy of girls' responses compared to boys' responses was evident for the youngest age group 5—7 years, see Figures 4B,C.

In the less demanding NoH-comparison task girls of all three age groups even recognized the need-of-help at a performance level that did not differ statistically from that of the oldest children see Figure 4C.

This means that the 5—7 years old and 8—9 years old girls exhibited average need-of-help recognition accuracies similar to those of boys and girls aged 10— Boys showed the expected gradual improvement of accuracy in both need-of-help recognition tasks as well as in the control Human-bird-distinction task.

Girls' accuracy, on the other hand, was noticeably high and stable across age groups in the need-of-help related tasks. Our results thus show that while boys demonstrate a gradual accuracy increase with age that contributes to the absence of any gender differences in the oldest age group here 10—13 years of age , girls' need-of-help recognition abilities tend to be high from an early age on.

Differences between boys and girls in hit rates were restricted to the two need-of-help related tasks, but were not at all present in the Human-bird distinction task. In this control task a gender independent improvement of performance with age was observed, as would be expected for categorization tasks relying on perceptual abilities Kail, ; Batty and Taylor, Thus, the observed accuracy advantage of the younger girls is likely to be specific to need-of-help recognition abilities, not attributable to general developmental or motivational differences between boys and girls.

This conclusion was further substantiated by the fact that a smaller subsample of children unable or unwilling to complete all three tasks exhibited response patterns similar to those described above. Since this is the first study to investigate children's need-of-help recognition capacity, we cannot directly relate the present findings to previous literature. The data discussed here is not sufficient to identify the underlying mechanisms or aspects of the processes leading to systematic age-specific differences between boys and girls.

The observed differences between younger boys and girls might, however, be explained within the larger framework of differences between men and women in processing of socially relevant content. This has already been discussed with regard to socially relevant stimuli, such as biological motion or social scenes Proverbio et al.

It could be that girls allocate a higher amount of attention to the socially relevant content of the presented visual stimuli from an early age on, while for boys the relevance of the stimuli' social content increases gradually with age. Whether this is a valid explanation cannot be resolved completely on the ground of the present data, but systematic associations between response accuracies for different tasks provide helpful indications see Figures 6A — C.

We found that girls' accuracy correlated across need-of-help related tasks. Boys' response accuracies did not correlate across the two help content related tasks, but were related across both paradigms with identical time-restricted presentation and decision after stimulus offset regardless of the different content of the two tasks NoH- vs.

Human-bird-distinction, Figure 6B. This means that girls who showed high accuracy in one of the two no-need-of-help related tasks also tended to do so in the other one. In contrast, boys accuracies correlated under the condition of short presentation time and decision from memory regardless of task content see Figure 6.

Thus, we observed systematic differences regarding which features of a task elicited coherent behavioral responses in boys and girls. This finding could indicate that girls allocate more attention or other information processing resources to socially relevant picture content than boys.

This observation is further differentiated by the fact that the correlation between accuracies in the two help-related paradigms observed for girls was carried by their responses to pictures of humans compare Figures 7A,B. We did not find such a human-specific accuracy correlation for boys. We propose that the importance of the pictures' socially relevant content might have been greater for girls than for boys. Further studies are necessary to test these assumptions.

Systematic measures of attention allocation and its psychophysiological correlates would help determine whether gender related performance differences reported here reflect systematic differences in early information processing.

Also, future studies including infants and younger children which take a broader range of social, cultural and biological influences into account will help to clarify to what extend the gender related differences in this study are the result of an interaction between biological and socio-cultural influences. At this point we can only assume that the reported findings cannot solely originate from either biological or social factors.

Generally, the magnitude of differences between boys and girls in need-of-help recognition tasks decreased with age. No differences were detectable between boys and girls in the oldest age group 10—13 years ; they were moderate in the middle age group 8—9 years and largest in the youngest age group 5—7 years, see Table 2. These results appear to contrast with the finding that gender differences in neuronal correlates of social perception increase with age Anderson et al.

However, it must be pointed out that the participants in Anderson's study only viewed socially relevant stimuli biological motion and non-social stimuli scrambled motion passively. It might thus be that for decision processes, as assessed in our study, differences between boys and girls follow a different developmental trajectory compared to socio-perceptual processes alone. It might also be that the gender differences described with regard to children's brain activity while passively viewing visual stimuli Anderson et al.

An additional explanation for diminishing gender differences with age could also be sought in the subjectively perceived difficulty of the tasks: The high and stable performance levels of the oldest children suggest a ceiling effect, i. Indications for increasing ease of processing with age is also provided by the fact that children's RTs decreased with age across tasks.

Measures of response accuracy and measures of speed of response are sensitive to different aspects of processing in adults Santee and Egeth, ; Prinzmetal et al. Mirroring these broadly documented findings, children's RTs in this study tell a somewhat different story than their performance accuracies.

We found the expected age related decrease in RTs e. As opposed to findings regarding children's accuracy, differences between boys and girls in RTs were present for the youngest and middle age groups across all three experimental paradigms.

For the oldest boys and girls 10—13 years no gender differences in RTs were observed in any of the three experimental paradigms just as there were no such differences in accuracy. The magnitudes of gender related differences for the two younger age groups were small to moderate see Table 2. These results rule out a possible explanation that the youngest girls have an advantage in need-of-help recognition accuracies by means of a speed-accuracy tradeoff. They also show that younger girls are not specifically faster at recognizing need-of-help content but rather respond faster compared to same age boys across all three experimental paradigms employed here.

Still, only in need-of-help recognition tasks, differences between boys and girls were also evident in the middle age group, albeit moderate in size see Table 2.

This pattern of results could be seen as an indication that an initially generally faster response speed of younger girls turns into a more specific need-of-help related advantage in the middle age group and diminishes completely for the oldest children.

Further research is necessary to determine cause and extend of faster RTs for younger girls and the reasons it diminishes with age. In light of previous research on social perception e. On the basis of the data available, we cannot determine whether the observed faster RTs of younger girls reflect a general developmental advantage or whether they are restricted to pictures of humans and birds or other animals.

Such pictures of animate objects might carry higher social significance than pictures of objects or scenes as e. In light of previous results showing own-gender related associations between the actor and observer's gender in social perception Kret and De Gelder, and differences in prosocial behavior e.

We found no indication for such own-gender effects when merely a decision regarding need-of-help was required: No interaction of the pictures' and children's gender was observed in either response accuracy or RTs.

Thus, differences between boys and girls in our study cannot be explained by means of greater reactivity or expertise to own-gender depictions. Moreover, these results show that the gender of the depicted child, a task-irrelevant aspect of picture content, had no influence on response characteristics in this study. Whether different kinds of stimuli, such as for example photographs or portraits containing clearer references to a person's gender than the comic-like drawings employed here, are more likely to induce own-gender effects, remains to be determined in future research.

In conclusion, our study shows that need-of-help recognition abilities in a normative child population improve with age; developmental trajectories differ for boys and girls. We found a relative advantage of 5—7 years old girls compared to boys of the same age specifically regarding accuracy of need-of-help recognition.

We also found systematic tendencies for faster RTs of younger girls that are not restricted to need-of-help recognition, but seem to be of more general nature. The magnitude of all reported gender effects decreased with age, no indication for systematic differences in either hit rates or RTs between boys and girls above the age of 9 years was found in any experimental paradigms.

One possible explanation for the higher response accuracy of younger girls could be that the social information was more relevant for girls than for boys in the present context, as indicated by correlation findings. The present study does not provide any indication, whether the observed gender related differences result in motivational differences between boys and girls see Hepach et al.

It shows, however, that the initial accuracy of need-of-help recognition differs between boys and girls at younger ages, and that gender related differences diminish with increasing age. These results can serve to explain some of the gender related variance in prosocial behavior. They put forward the need to not only assess the motivation to help or the performance of helping behavior, but also its perceptual precedents. Only then those different stages of helping can be linked together.

Moreover, our results add evidence to the notion that social stimuli, especially such involving purposeful human action, might be treated with higher priority by female participants already in early childhood.

Further studies are needed to uncover the mechanisms underlying need-of-help recognition and the observed gender differences in early childhood, as well as to determine which factors drive these differences in younger children and which factors in turn lead to an extinction of these effects in older age groups. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Funding was provided by the Zukunftskolleg of the University of Konstanz. We thank the children who participated in this study and extend our gratitude to the researchers who assisted with data collection: Tobias Heikamp, Irina Iljuschin, Muna Pohl, Monique Orzechowski, Corinna Wolf, and Stefan Wolf.

Anderson, L. Sex differences in the development of brain mechanisms for processing biological motion. Neuroimage 83, — Balliet, D. Sex differences in cooperation: a meta-analytic review of social dilemmas. Batty, M. Visual categorization during childhood: an ERP study. Psychophysiology 39, — Brielmann, A. A new standardized stimulus set for studying need-of-help recognition NeoHelp. Brownell, C. Socialization of early prosocial behavior: parents' talk about emotions is associated with sharing and helping in toddlers.

Infancy 18, 91— Brunet, E. A PET investigation of the attribution of intentions with a nonverbal task. Neuroimage 11, — Carpenter, M. Child Dev. Cassidy, K. The relationship between psychological understanding and positive social behaviors. CrossRef Full Text. Chiu, L. The neural correlates of reasoning about prosocial-helping decisions: an event-related brain potentials study.

Brain Res. Cole, P. Calkins and M. Croson, R. Gender differences in preferences. Davidson, M. Development of cognitive control and executive functions from 4 to 13 years: Evidence from manipulations of memory, inhibition, and task switching. It is a good idea to collect certificates showing your progress in English and add them to your professional portfolio.

Is there a registration fee? You will only pay your course fees. However, if you book other services with us, additional fees may apply. If you attend our part-time English courses, you will need to buy a course book. With our intensive English courses student books are available to buy or borrow from the school.

Ask your teacher what was done, check with a colleague their notes and your text book. Average Rating: 4. Link School of English in London — partners. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Both have been shown to develop throughout childhood in a variety of tasks, including differentiation of emotional stimuli e.

Therefore, a control task was used to provide baseline measures for these response characteristics independently of need-of-help recognition. This control task required children to indicate whether they had seen a human or bird. Importantly, all three experimental paradigms employed the identical visual stimuli in order to ensure that variations in response patterns were attributable to differences in information processing and decision characteristics only—not to differences in stimulus material.

Below we first discuss response accuracy as a measure of need-of-help recognition capacity before turning to children's RTs which are assessed here as an indication of ease of processing and decision.

Overall, high accuracies were observed across all experimental paradigms, providing evidence that the tasks were doable for children in all three age groups: They reliably recognized situations in which a human child or a bird was in need of help and distinguished between humans and birds. Even the somewhat abstract and unrealistic depictions of birds in human-like need-of-help situations did not pose difficulties to this normative population of children aged 5—13 years when it came to recognizing need-of-help content.

The children's need-of-help recognition accuracy increased with age, as would be expected for a variety of differentiation tasks see for example Davidson et al. This was, however, not equally true for boys and girls. Moreover, age-related increases in hit rates differed systematically between need-of-help related tasks and the Human-bird-distinction task. In both need-of-help recognition tasks, but not in the control Human-bird-distinction task, a clearly higher accuracy of girls' responses compared to boys' responses was evident for the youngest age group 5—7 years, see Figures 4B,C.

This means that the 5—7 years old and 8—9 years old girls exhibited average need-of-help recognition accuracies similar to those of boys and girls aged 10— Boys showed the expected gradual improvement of accuracy in both need-of-help recognition tasks as well as in the control Human-bird-distinction task.

Girls' accuracy, on the other hand, was noticeably high and stable across age groups in the need-of-help related tasks. Our results thus show that while boys demonstrate a gradual accuracy increase with age that contributes to the absence of any gender differences in the oldest age group here 10—13 years of age , girls' need-of-help recognition abilities tend to be high from an early age on.

Differences between boys and girls in hit rates were restricted to the two need-of-help related tasks, but were not at all present in the Human-bird distinction task. In this control task a gender independent improvement of performance with age was observed, as would be expected for categorization tasks relying on perceptual abilities Kail, ; Batty and Taylor, Thus, the observed accuracy advantage of the younger girls is likely to be specific to need-of-help recognition abilities, not attributable to general developmental or motivational differences between boys and girls.

This conclusion was further substantiated by the fact that a smaller subsample of children unable or unwilling to complete all three tasks exhibited response patterns similar to those described above. Since this is the first study to investigate children's need-of-help recognition capacity, we cannot directly relate the present findings to previous literature. The data discussed here is not sufficient to identify the underlying mechanisms or aspects of the processes leading to systematic age-specific differences between boys and girls.

The observed differences between younger boys and girls might, however, be explained within the larger framework of differences between men and women in processing of socially relevant content. This has already been discussed with regard to socially relevant stimuli, such as biological motion or social scenes Proverbio et al. It could be that girls allocate a higher amount of attention to the socially relevant content of the presented visual stimuli from an early age on, while for boys the relevance of the stimuli' social content increases gradually with age.

We found that girls' accuracy correlated across need-of-help related tasks. Boys' response accuracies did not correlate across the two help content related tasks, but were related across both paradigms with identical time-restricted presentation and decision after stimulus offset regardless of the different content of the two tasks NoH- vs. This means that girls who showed high accuracy in one of the two no-need-of-help related tasks also tended to do so in the other one.

Thus, we observed systematic differences regarding which features of a task elicited coherent behavioral responses in boys and girls. This finding could indicate that girls allocate more attention or other information processing resources to socially relevant picture content than boys. This observation is further differentiated by the fact that the correlation between accuracies in the two help-related paradigms observed for girls was carried by their responses to pictures of humans compare Figures 7A,B.

We did not find such a human-specific accuracy correlation for boys. We propose that the importance of the pictures' socially relevant content might have been greater for girls than for boys. Further studies are necessary to test these assumptions. Systematic measures of attention allocation and its psychophysiological correlates would help determine whether gender related performance differences reported here reflect systematic differences in early information processing. Also, future studies including infants and younger children which take a broader range of social, cultural and biological influences into account will help to clarify to what extend the gender related differences in this study are the result of an interaction between biological and socio-cultural influences.

At this point we can only assume that the reported findings cannot solely originate from either biological or social factors. Generally, the magnitude of differences between boys and girls in need-of-help recognition tasks decreased with age. These results appear to contrast with the finding that gender differences in neuronal correlates of social perception increase with age Anderson et al.

However, it must be pointed out that the participants in Anderson's study only viewed socially relevant stimuli biological motion and non-social stimuli scrambled motion passively. It might thus be that for decision processes, as assessed in our study, differences between boys and girls follow a different developmental trajectory compared to socio-perceptual processes alone. It might also be that the gender differences described with regard to children's brain activity while passively viewing visual stimuli Anderson et al.

An additional explanation for diminishing gender differences with age could also be sought in the subjectively perceived difficulty of the tasks: The high and stable performance levels of the oldest children suggest a ceiling effect, i.

Indications for increasing ease of processing with age is also provided by the fact that children's RTs decreased with age across tasks.

Measures of response accuracy and measures of speed of response are sensitive to different aspects of processing in adults Santee and Egeth, ; Prinzmetal et al. Mirroring these broadly documented findings, children's RTs in this study tell a somewhat different story than their performance accuracies.

We found the expected age related decrease in RTs e. As opposed to findings regarding children's accuracy, differences between boys and girls in RTs were present for the youngest and middle age groups across all three experimental paradigms.

For the oldest boys and girls 10—13 years no gender differences in RTs were observed in any of the three experimental paradigms just as there were no such differences in accuracy. These results rule out a possible explanation that the youngest girls have an advantage in need-of-help recognition accuracies by means of a speed-accuracy tradeoff. They also show that younger girls are not specifically faster at recognizing need-of-help content but rather respond faster compared to same age boys across all three experimental paradigms employed here.

This pattern of results could be seen as an indication that an initially generally faster response speed of younger girls turns into a more specific need-of-help related advantage in the middle age group and diminishes completely for the oldest children. Further research is necessary to determine cause and extend of faster RTs for younger girls and the reasons it diminishes with age. In light of previous research on social perception e.

On the basis of the data available, we cannot determine whether the observed faster RTs of younger girls reflect a general developmental advantage or whether they are restricted to pictures of humans and birds or other animals.

Such pictures of animate objects might carry higher social significance than pictures of objects or scenes as e. In light of previous results showing own-gender related associations between the actor and observer's gender in social perception Kret and De Gelder, and differences in prosocial behavior e.

We found no indication for such own-gender effects when merely a decision regarding need-of-help was required: No interaction of the pictures' and children's gender was observed in either response accuracy or RTs. Thus, differences between boys and girls in our study cannot be explained by means of greater reactivity or expertise to own-gender depictions.

Moreover, these results show that the gender of the depicted child, a task-irrelevant aspect of picture content, had no influence on response characteristics in this study. Whether different kinds of stimuli, such as for example photographs or portraits containing clearer references to a person's gender than the comic-like drawings employed here, are more likely to induce own-gender effects, remains to be determined in future research.

In conclusion, our study shows that need-of-help recognition abilities in a normative child population improve with age; developmental trajectories differ for boys and girls. We found a relative advantage of 5—7 years old girls compared to boys of the same age specifically regarding accuracy of need-of-help recognition. We also found systematic tendencies for faster RTs of younger girls that are not restricted to need-of-help recognition, but seem to be of more general nature. The magnitude of all reported gender effects decreased with age, no indication for systematic differences in either hit rates or RTs between boys and girls above the age of 9 years was found in any experimental paradigms.

One possible explanation for the higher response accuracy of younger girls could be that the social information was more relevant for girls than for boys in the present context, as indicated by correlation findings. The present study does not provide any indication, whether the observed gender related differences result in motivational differences between boys and girls see Hepach et al.

It shows, however, that the initial accuracy of need-of-help recognition differs between boys and girls at younger ages, and that gender related differences diminish with increasing age. These results can serve to explain some of the gender related variance in prosocial behavior.

They put forward the need to not only assess the motivation to help or the performance of helping behavior, but also its perceptual precedents. Only then those different stages of helping can be linked together. Moreover, our results add evidence to the notion that social stimuli, especially such involving purposeful human action, might be treated with higher priority by female participants already in early childhood.

Further studies are needed to uncover the mechanisms underlying need-of-help recognition and the observed gender differences in early childhood, as well as to determine which factors drive these differences in younger children and which factors in turn lead to an extinction of these effects in older age groups. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Funding was provided by the Zukunftskolleg of the University of Konstanz. We thank the children who participated in this study and extend our gratitude to the researchers who assisted with data collection: Tobias Heikamp, Irina Iljuschin, Muna Pohl, Monique Orzechowski, Corinna Wolf, and Stefan Wolf.

National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Journal List Front Psychol v. Front Psychol. Published online Feb Brielmann 1. Aenne A. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Daum, University of Zurich, Switzerland.

This article was submitted to Developmental Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Received Oct 30; Accepted Feb The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author s or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice.

No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. PDF 1. Abstract The exploratory study presented here examines children's ability to recognize another person's need-of-help.

Keywords: child development, social categorization, helping behavior, prosocial behavior, altruism, socioemotional development, psychology, gender differences.

Introduction Helping is an important aspect of prosocial interaction in humans and to a lesser degree in primates Warneken and Tomasello, , ; Liebal et al. Open in a separate window. Figure 2. Methods Ethics statement Parents gave written informed consent according to the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki before their children participated in this study.

Participants and exclusion criteria Data collection for this study occurred at an open-air cost-free festival for children that took place in the German city of Konstanz. Table 1 Population characteristics and number of trials obtained per age group and paradigm. Figure 1. Setting and technical apparatus The experiment took place at an open air child festival. Results Population characteristics The age of the 58 children who completed all three paradigms ranged from 5 to Figure 3.

Figure 4. Influences of age and gender on RTs in need-of-help recognition RTs were more sensitive to influences of age group and gender as well as to their interactions than hit rates.

Stability of age and gender effects across subsamples In order to assess whether the results reported above are restricted to particularly motivated or more developmentally advanced children we also analyzed the subsample of 22 children who had decided to end their participation before completing all three paradigms.

Figure 5. Paradigm Age group Hit rates RTs d gender d age girls d age boys d gender d age girls d age boys Human-bird-distinction Youngest 0.

Correlation analyses of response characteristics Correlation analyses were conducted to detect systematic relations between children's responses across experimental paradigms. Figure 6.

Figure 7. Relation between observers' and picture's gender Only responses to depictions of humans with an identifiable gender e.

Discussion The capacity to identify a situation in which someone needs help is a necessary precondition for initiating helping behavior. Conflict of interest statement The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments Funding was provided by the Zukunftskolleg of the University of Konstanz. References Anderson L. Sex differences in the development of brain mechanisms for processing biological motion. Neuroimage 83 , — Sex differences in cooperation: a meta-analytic review of social dilemmas. Visual categorization during childhood: an ERP study. Psychophysiology 39 , — A new standardized stimulus set for studying need-of-help recognition NeoHelp.

Socialization of early prosocial behavior: parents' talk about emotions is associated with sharing and helping in toddlers. Infancy 18 , 91— A PET investigation of the attribution of intentions with a nonverbal task. Neuroimage 11 , — Child Dev.

The relationship between psychological understanding and positive social behaviors. The neural correlates of reasoning about prosocial-helping decisions: an event-related brain potentials study. Brain Res. The role of language in the development of emotion regulation. Gender differences in preferences.