High school students who had been pretested on the Mehrabian and Epstein (1972) measure of empathy were shown a brief videotaped presentation designed to elicit empathic arousal for a particular group of children (mentally retarded or crippled). Each individual was subsequently given an opportunity to act charitably for a recipient group which was…

This paper attempts to tie empathy to the individual's development of a cognitive sense of the other, and thus to lay the groundwork for a stage analysis of the development of altruistic motivation. The first stage proposed in this scheme is empathic distress, the involuntary experiencing of another person's painful emotional state. Empathic…

Children's sharing and helping behaviors were observed after they had seen an adult who modeled donation behavior and/or who preached either about the importance of sharing or about the importance of helping others. (Author/JMB)

Compared 57 homosexual men and 45 lesbians on six dimensions of beliefs about human nature. On only one dimension was significant difference found: lesbians saw people as more altruistic and less selfish than did homosexual men. Findings are consistent with the few personality studies which report no differences between homosexuals and lesbians.…

Examines the issue of developmental consistencies between and within levels of moral reasoning, altruism, and perspective coordination. The relative contributions of perspective coordination and moral reasoning to altruistic behavior were examined in fifth grade. (Author/RH)

An exploratory study was made of the emotional and social functioning of young children having one manic-depressive parent. Semi-naturalistic observations and experimental manipulations of the affective environment were used to assess two-year-olds' regulation of emotion, as well as their aggression, altruism, and affiliative interactions.…

Four age groups of boys were given three opportunities to display altruistic behavior. Sharing and helping increased with age. Volunteering to work showed no relationship to age. (ST)

In this article an attempt has been made to identify Black unity and a discussion of how achieving a sense of collective Black identity, through utilizing skills peculiar to the human potential movement, can serve as a positive force to unite blacks. (Author)

Assesses the extent to which certain key behaviors said to involve perspective-taking (specifically, cognitive and affective perspective-taking, and altruism) were related to friendship as opposed to popularity. (Author/MP)

Argues that in order to understand how the capacity for altruism develops and comes under self-control it is necessary first to understand the nature and development of the self-control. (MP)

Seventh-grade children participated under two successive incentive conditions (self-prize and other prize) in a study of transgression behavior in a temptation task in which children were alternately offered a self-gratifying and an altruisitic incentive for successful performance. Most subjects behaved consistently across the incentive…

Results showed that experimentally produced variations in the person orientation of three nine-year-old female confederates affected the socialization techniques employed by 24 female college students who were attempting to elicit altruistic behavior from the children. (JMB)

Investigates the effects of age, competition outcome, and level of aggressiveness during competition as factors related to interpersonal sharing. Subjects were 40 six- to-eleven-year-old boys. (CM)

Two field experiments were conducted to determine the motivations involved in positive mood and guilt-induced helping behavior. (Author)