Nancy Eisenberg

Arizona State University | ASU · Department of Psychology

Introduction Prosocial behavior (i.e., voluntary actions aimed at benefiting others, such as helping, comforting, and sharing) has proven beneficial for individuals' adjustment during the transition to adolescence. However, less is known about the role of the broader sociocultural context in shaping prosocial development across different cultures....

Introduction Existing research highlights the significance of prosocial behavior (voluntary, intentional behavior that results in benefits for another) to people's well‐being. Yet, the extent to which this expected positive relation operates at the within‐person level (e.g., is more prosocial behavior than usual related to a higher than usual level...

The field of developmental psychopathology tends to focus on the negative aspects of functioning. However, prosocial behavior and empathy-related responding – positive aspects of functioning– might relate to some aspects of psychopathology in meaningful ways. In this article, we review research on the relations of three types of developmental psych...

Emotion Regulation and Parenting provides a state-of-the-art account of research conducted on emotion regulation in parenting. After describing the conceptual foundations of parenthood and emotion regulation, the book reviews the influence of parents' emotion regulation on parenting, how and to what extent emotion regulation influences child develo...

Research suggests that parental substance use disorder is associated with adolescent drinking indirectly through negative urgency, a form of impulsivity that is particularly associated with high-risk drinking. Moreover, childhood mechanisms of risk may play a role in this developmental chain such that childhood temperament and parenting may be mech...

Emotionality and self-regulation are crucial for positive development, especially during early adolescence whenyouths experience normative increases in behavioral problems and declines in prosociality. Using Latent ProfileAnalysis (LPA-a person-oriented technique to identify patterns of functioning within individuals), we identifiedyouths’ profiles...

Despite broad interest in how children and youth cope with stress and how others can support their coping, this is the first Handbook to consolidate the many theories and large bodies of research that contribute to the study of the development of coping. The Handbook's goal is field building - it brings together theory and research from across the...

Prosociality is a multifaceted concept referring to the many ways in which individuals care about and benefit others. Human prosociality is foundational to social harmony, happiness, and peace; it is therefore essential to understand its underpinnings, development, and cultivation. This handbook provides a state-of-the-art, in-depth account of scie...

White children's effortful control (EC), parents' implicit racial attitudes, and their interaction were examined as predictors of children's prosocial behavior toward White versus Black recipients. Data were collected from 171 White children (55% male, Mage = 7.13 years, SD = 0.92) and their parent in 2017. Prosocial behavior toward White peers was...

Introduction This longitudinal study examined unique and joint effects of parenting and negative emotionality in predicting the growth curves of adolescents’ self-efficacy beliefs about regulating two discrete negative emotions (anger and sadness) and the association of these growth curves with later maladjustment (i.e., internalizing and externali...

Objective We examined the associations among parenting, children's moral emotions, and children's prosocial behaviors toward Black peers and White peers. Background Parenting practices inform children's prosocial behaviors; however, the contextual and individual factors that predict children's differentiated prosocial behaviors have been understud...

Objective This ecological study explored the association between regulatory emotional self-efficacy beliefs in managing negative emotions (RESE-NE) and heart rate variability (HRV), a measure of parasympathetic modulation of the heart that has been positively associated with a better ability to flexibly adjust to a changing environment and regulat...

The goal of this study was to investigate the development of young children's goal-directed behaviors in challenging settings––an important behavioral component of mastery motivation – and to examine the relations of maternal warmth and control to its trajectory from toddlerhood to preschool age. A behavioral component of mastery motivation was obs...

Regulatory emotional self-efficacy beliefs (RESE) in managing negative emotions and in expressing positive emotions are believed to play an important role in different spheres of psychological functioning. However, the literature does not offer a quantitative synthesis of the degree of the relation between RESE and indices of (mal)adjustment. The p...

We examined the relation of White parents’ color-blind racial attitudes (a global composite score and its subscales) and their implicit racial attitudes to their young children’s race-based sympathy toward Black and White victims. One hundred and nighty non-Hispanic White children (54% boys, Mage = 7.13 years, SD = 0.92) reported their sympathy in...

Although there is interest in the role of peers in children's schooling experiences, few researchers have examined associations and related underlying processes between peers’ emotionality, an aspect of temperament, and children's academic achievement. This study evaluated whether target children's (N = 260) own self‐regulation, assessed with two b...

Objective Effortful control (EC) has been conceptualized as a higher-order construct defined by a class of self-regulatory mechanisms. However, the developmental higher-order structure of EC has seldom been investigated with a thorough psychometric analysis. To begin to fill this gap in the literature, data were obtained from parents and teachers o...

Informed by attachment theory and self-determination theory, the goal of this study was to test the hypothesis that behavioral engagement mediates the longitudinal associations between teacher–child relationship quality and academic achievement. In addition, in an exploratory manner, we expected to identify some additional transactional relations a...

This study investigated developmental trajectories of observationally coded engagement across the early elementary years and whether these trajectories were associated with children's academic achievement. Furthermore, we evaluated if these relations varied as a function of children's family socio-economic status and early reading and math skills....

Although scholars are increasingly building empirical evidence that helps us understand racism, they have conducted surprisingly little research on White children’s prosocial behavior towards historically marginalized people. 190 White, non-Hispanic children (M = 7.09 years, 54.2% boys) participated in the study. We examined whether both parents’ r...

Relations among White (non-Latinx) children's empathy-related responding, prosocial behaviors, and racial attitudes toward White and Black peers were examined. In 2017, 190 (54% boys) White 5- to 9-year-old children (M = 7.09 years, SD = 0.94) watched a series of videos that depicted social rejection of either a White or Black child. Empathy-relate...

This study examined gender-specific longitudinal pathways from harsh parenting through rumination to anxiety and depression symptoms among early adolescents from three countries and six subgroups. Participants were 567 mothers, 428 fathers, and 566 children (T1: Mage = 10.89; 50% girls) from Medellín, Colombia (n = 100); Naples, Italy (n = 95); Rom...

Promoting prosocial behavior toward those who are dissimilar from oneself is an urgent contemporary issue. Because children spend much time in same-gender relationships, promoting other-gender prosociality could help them develop more inclusive relationships. Our goal in the present research was to better understand the extent to which elementary-s...

This longitudinal study examined the unique and joint effects of early adolescent temperament and parenting in predicting the development of adolescent internalizing symptoms in a cross-cultural sample. Participants were 544 early adolescents (T1: Mage = 12.58; 49.5% female) and their mothers (n = 530) from Medellín, Colombia (n = 88), Naples, Ital...

Prosocial behavior refers to voluntary behavior that benefits others (Eisenberg et al., 2015). Although there has been increasing empirical attention to understanding racism, there has been surprisingly less focus on children’s positive social behaviors toward “the other.” In this study, We examined the prediction of children’s differential prosoci...

This study examines associations between parents’ rejection and control, adolescents’ self-efficacy in their regulation of negative emotions, and maladjustment. Path analyses were employed to test (a) whether adolescents’ dysregulation and self-efficacy regarding anger/sadness regulation mediate the relationship between parental rejection/control a...

In this article, we identify approaches for understanding more thoroughly the academic and social experiences of homeschooled students. The growth of the homeschooling movement in the United States, questions about the need for additional regulation, and the importance of high‐quality education for children motivate this scholarly effort. We begin...

In diesem Kapitel betrachten wir viele entwicklungsrelevante Aspekte familiärer Interaktionen. Wir beginnen mit einer Untersuchung über den möglichen Einfluss von sozialen Veränderungen in den letzten Jahrzehnten in den Vereinigten Staaten auf das Funktionieren von Familie und die Entwicklung der Kinder – vom Alter der ersten Elternschaft bis zu ei...

Im Zentrum des vorliegenden Kapitels steht die Entwicklung fundamentaler Konzepte, die sich in den allermeisten Situationen als nützlich erweisen. Konzepte sind geistige Vorstellungen über die Struktur von Gegenständen, Ereignissen, Eigenschaften oder Beziehungen auf der Basis ihrer Ähnlichkeit. Diese Konzepte lassen sich zwei Gruppen zuordnen. Ein...

In diesem Kapitel behandeln wir die Entwicklung in drei eng miteinander verwandten Bereichen: der Wahrnehmung, dem Handeln und dem Lernen. Unsere Darstellung konzentriert sich vorrangig auf die frühe Kindheit, da sich während der ersten beiden Lebensjahre eines Kindes in allen drei Bereichen außerordentlich schnelle Entwicklungen vollziehen. Ein we...

In diesem Kapitel betrachten wir die besondere Beschaffenheit der Interaktionen mit Gleichaltrigen und ihre Auswirkungen auf die soziale Entwicklung von Kindern. Zuerst besprechen wir theoretische Perspektiven zur besonderen Rolle der Interaktionen mit Gleichaltrigen. Nachfolgend betrachten wir Freundschaften, die engste Form solcher Beziehungen. D...

In diesem Kapitel diskutieren wir vor allem die folgenden beiden Fragen: Wie ähnlich oder unterschiedlich sind Mädchen und Jungen in Bezug auf bestimmte psychologische Variablen? Und was könnte Unterschieden zwischen ihnen zugrunde liegen? Nach einer eingehenderen Beschäftigung mit den Begriffen „Geschlecht“ und „Gender“ betrachten wir zunächst die...

In diesem Kapitel untersuchen wir den Verlauf der pränatalen Entwicklung – einer Zeit erstaunlich schnellen und dramatischen Wandels. Wir werden Störeinflüsse und Umweltgefahren, die den sich entwickelnden Fötus schädigen können, betrachten. Danach behandeln wir in Kürze den Prozess der Geburt und besondere Verhaltensaspekte des Neugeborenen. Schli...

Bevor wir uns den Forschungsarbeiten zur Entwicklung der Intelligenz zuwenden, geht es zunächst darum zu klären, was Intelligenz ist. In den meisten Bereichen der kognitiven Entwicklung wie Wahrnehmung, Sprache und Begriffsverstehen werden altersbezogene Veränderungen geprüft. Aber die Intelligenzforschung interessiert sich auch für individuelle Un...

Im vorliegenden Kapitel werden fünf besonders einflussreiche Theorien der kognitiven Entwicklung untersucht: die Theorie von Jean Piaget, der Informationsverarbeitungsansatz, die domänenspezifischen Ansätze und Kernwissenstheorien, die soziokulturelle Perspektive sowie die Perspektive dynamischer Systeme. Wir erläutern hierzu die ihnen zugrunde lie...

Wir beginnen unsere Darstellung der Moralentwicklung mit der Untersuchung des moralischen Urteils von Kindern: Wie denken Kinder über Situationen, an denen moralische Entscheidungen beteiligt sind? Danach betrachten wir Befunde über die frühe Entstehung des Gewissens und die Entwicklung prosozialen Verhaltens – dazu gehören Verhaltensweisen wie Hel...

Wesentlich für das Verständnis der Entwicklung ist die Kenntnis der biologischen Grundlagen, die Verhalten beeinflussen. Der Schwerpunkt dieses Kapitels liegt auf den wichtigsten biologischen Faktoren, die vom Augenblick der Befruchtung bis in die Pubertät hinein im Spiel sind: die Vererbung und der Einfluss der Gene, die Entwicklung und frühe Funk...

Wir geben in diesem Kapitel einen Überblick über einige der einflussreichsten allgemeinen Theorien der sozialen Entwicklung. Diese Theorien sind auf die Erklärung vieler wichtiger Entwicklungsaspekte gerichtet, beispielsweise Emotionen, Motivation, Persönlichkeit, Bindung, Selbst, Beziehungen zu Gleichaltrigen, Moral und Geschlecht. In diesem Kapit...

Dieses abschließende Kapitel vermittelt einen Überblick darüber, wie die vielen Aspekte, die Sie in diesem Buch kennengelernt haben, in ein integratives Rahmenkonzept eingebunden werden können. Wie dargelegt zielen die meisten Forschungsarbeiten zur Kindesentwicklung letztendlich darauf ab, grundlegende Fragen zu verstehen, die mit den in ► Kap. 1...

Emotionen sind ein grundlegender Teil der menschlichen Erfahrung, aber wie Kinder lernen, ihre Gefühle und ihr Verhalten zu regulieren, kann lebenslange Konsequenzen haben. In diesem Kapitel untersuchen wir die Entwicklung von Emotionen sowie die Entwicklung der Fähigkeit von Kindern, ihre Gefühle und das mit ihnen zusammenhängende Verhalten zu reg...

An important part of children's social and cognitive development is their understanding that people are psychological beings with internal, mental states including desire, intention, perception, and belief. A full understanding of people as psychological beings requires a representational theory of mind (ToM), which is an understanding that mental...

This research investigated the psychometric properties of the Prosociality Scale and its cross-cultural validation and generalizability across five different western and non-western countries (China, Chile, Italy, Spain, and the United States). The scale was designed to measure individual differences in a global tendency to behave in prosocial ways...

In this short-term longitudinal study, we tested if peers' temperament in the fall of second grade predicted target children's (N = 241) student–teacher conflict and closeness in the spring of second grade and whether target children's self-regulation moderated these associations. Based on regression analyses, peers' negative emotionality was negat...

The main goal of this study was to more closely understand the direction of relations between maternal behavior and young children's defiance and committed compliance. We examined 256 mother–child dyads to explore developmental transactional relations between maternal assertive control, children's committed compliance, and children's defiance at 18...

This study tested whether the relations between parental warmth and children’s problem behaviors vary as a function of the quality of the teacher-student relationship while controlling for prior levels of the outcomes. When children (N = 301, M age = 5.48, 52% girls) were in kindergarten, teachers reported on the quality of the teacher-student rela...

This study tested whether the relations between parental warmth and children’s problem behaviors vary as a function of the quality of the teacher-student relationship while controlling for prior levels of the outcomes. When children (N = 301, M age = 5.48, 52% girls) were in kindergarten, teachers reported on the quality of the teacher-student rela...

Objective Despite concerns about the inaccuracy of parents’ reports of children’s sleep, it remains unclear whether the bias of parents’ reports varies across racial/ethnic groups. To address this limitation, the current study systematically investigated the concordance among parent-reported sleep questionnaires, sleep diaries, and actigraphy-based...

Studies with extensive observations of real-life emotions at school are rare but might be especially useful for predicting school-related outcomes. This study evaluated observations of negative emotion expressivity in lunch and recreation settings across kindergarten, first grade, and second grade (N = 301), kindergarten teachers' reports of childr...

Negative urgency, rash action during negative mood states, is a strong predictor of risky behavior. However, its developmental antecedents remain largely unstudied. The current study tested whether childhood temperament served as a developmental antecedent to adolescent negative urgency. Participants (N=239) were from a longitudinal study oversampl...

Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) represent a specific class of prosocial behaviors observable in the organizational environment. This study examined the longitudinal relations among regulatory emotional, social and work self-efficacy beliefs, and their relations to Organizational Citizenship Behaviors directed at specific individuals (OC...

Dieses Standardwerk bietet allen, die sich beruflich oder privat für die Entwicklung im Kindes- und Jugendalter interessieren, umfassende Einblicke in den spannenden Prozess des Erwachsenwerdens. Die Autor*innen sind renommierte Wissenschaftler und Pädagogen. Sie haben diese Auflage grundlegend überarbeitet und um wichtige neue Informationen zur so...

Memorializes Claire B. Kopp (1931-2019). Between 1970 and 2000, she was a lecturer in psychology, assistant research psychologist, and clinical professor in the Departments of Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and Education and then adjunct professor in psychology at UCLA. At Claremont McKenna College, she was an adjunct professor in psychology from 1995 to...

The goal of this study was to investigate the relations between White parents’ implicit racial attitudes and their children’s racially-based bias in empathic concern towards White and Black victims of injustice, as well as the moderating role of children’s age in this relation. Five to 9-year-old children (N = 190; 103 boys) reported how sorry (i.e...

Negative emotional inertia refers to the degree of which a current emotional state can be predicted by a previous emotional state and it represents a relevant marker of psychological maladjustment. The current study tested a theoretical model in which the dynamic impact of daily hassles on negative emotional inertia is mediated by exhaustion, and m...

In this commentary, I delineate several questions raised by the Hammond and Drummond (2019) paper: (a) to why there seems to be an association between state positive emotion and prosocial behavior in young children, and if and how early positively tinged prosocial behavior provides a pathway to (b) later prosocial behavior more generally (normative...

This special issue consists of 20 articles that focus on issues related to Eisenberg and colleagues' (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998; Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Cumberland, 1998) model of emotion socialization processes and its relevance for understanding a range of aspects of children's socioemotional functioning. The various papers have addres...

The present study examines parents' self-efficacy about anger regulation and irritability as predictors of harsh parenting and adolescent children's irritability (i.e., mediators), which in turn were examined as predictors of adolescents' externalizing and internalizing problems. Mothers, fathers, and adolescents (N = 1,298 families) from 12 cultur...

Previous research has shown that children’s home environment plays an important role in children’s early language skills. Yet, few researchers have examined the unique role of family-level factors (SES, household chaos) on children’s learning, or focused on the longitudinal processes that might explain their relations to children’s early language s...

Empathy has been a key focus of social, developmental, and affective neuroscience for some time. However, research using neural measures to study empathy in response to social victimization is sparse, particularly for young children. In the present study, 58 children’s (White, non-Hispanic; five to nine years old) mu suppression was measured using...

Nearly half of adolescents experience depressive or aggressive symptoms that impair their functioning at some point in adolescence. Experiencing intense difficult emotions and difficulties regulating such emotions may lead to these depressive and aggressive symptoms. However, existing work largely investigates how adolescent emotions at a single ti...

Introduction Literature on adolescent prosocial behavior (PB) has grown tremendously since the development of The Prosocial Tendency Measure‐Revised (PTM‐R), which includes subscales assessing different types of PB. However, findings of gender differences are inconsistent across studies. Thus, we computed meta‐analyses to examine gender differences...

Without a doubt, parents play a critical role in socializing moral development in their children. This handbook provides a collection of state-of-the-art theories and research on the important role that parents play in moral development. The contributors take a comprehensive, yet nuanced approach to considering the links between parenting and diffe...

Attachment theorists have argued that securely attached children tend to exhibit flexible attention; the attention of children with resistant attachments is centered on attachment-related worries; children with avoidant attachments defensively focus attention away from attachment-related emotions/thoughts; and children with disorganized attachments...

The structure of executive function (EF), as it pertains to distinct “hot” (affectively salient) and “cool” (affectively neutral) dimensions, in early childhood is not well understood. Given that the neural circuitry underlying EF may become increasingly differentiated with development and enriched experiences, EF may become more dissociable into h...

Moderation and mediation models of religiosity and effortful control as predictors of tobacco and alcohol use were tested in this 2‐year longitudinal study of 563 16‐year‐old Muslim Indonesian adolescents. Adolescents reported their effortful control, religiosity, and tobacco and alcohol use and peers provided reports of adolescents’ effortful cont...

The goal of this study was to understand the role young children's sleep plays in the association between their family environment and academic achievement (AA) by examining sleep as a moderator between home chaos (chaos) and children's AA. We examined this question in a sample of 103 kindergarteners and 1st graders. In the fall, parents reported o...

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Objective Children's effortful control and impulsivity are important predictors of the personality trait, ego‐resiliency (i.e., resiliency). Most researchers have not considered the fact that effortful control and impulsivity share substantial conceptual and empirical overlap, yet they also have been shown to be distinct. We tested a bifactor model...

Generally, research on children's anger and prosocial outcomes has been inconsistent, perhaps because researchers have overlooked nuances in children's anger, such as whether the emotion is situational versus dispositional or is in response to blocked goals versus violations of moral principles (e.g., unfairness). Additionally, mixed findings may b...

The associations between children's (N = 301) observed expression of positive and negative emotion in school and symptoms of psychological maladjustment (i.e., depressive and externalizing symptoms) were examined from kindergarten to first grade. Positive and negative emotional expressivity levels were observed in school settings, and teachers repo...

Recently there has been an increasing appreciation of the role of emotion and its regulation in children's socioemotional functioning. Investigators have varied in their definitions of emotion regulation and related constructs. Different conceptualizations of emotion‐related regulation are discussed, and the usefulness of examining top‐down self‐re...

This study evaluated the association between children’s (N = 301) self-regulation and math and reading achievement in kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade. Children’s self-regulation was assessed using the Head–Toes–Knees–Shoulders (HTKS) task (involving control of gross body movements) and a computerized continuous performance task (CPT; assessi...

The goal of the study was to examine whether target children’s temperamental negative emotional expressivity (NEE) and effortful control in the fall of kindergarten predicted academic adjustment in the spring and whether a classmate’s NEE and effortful control moderated these relations. Target children’s NEE and effortful control were measured in t...

Using data from a study of 140 preschool children (39% female), we examined the relations between direct assessments of emotion knowledge and naturalistic observations of behavior during free‐play periods, and tested parent‐ and teacher‐reported effortful control as a moderator of these relations. Basic emotion recognition was unrelated to social p...

During adolescence, some personality characteristics may represent vulnerabilities to adolescents’ adjustment. Adopting a person-centered approach, the aims of this study were (a) to examine the relations of early adolescents’ personality profiles to internalizing (i.e., anxious/depressed, withdrawal, and somatic complaints) and externalizing (i.e....

Moderation and mediation models of the relation between religiosity and effortful control as predictors of problem behavior and aggression were assessed in this study of 237 16-year-old Muslim Indonesian adolescents. Adolescents reported their engagement in behavior required and recommended by their religion and their effortful control using the Ea...

Empathy plays a central role in prosocial behavior and human cooperation. Very few twin researchers have investigated innate and environmental effects in adult empathy, and twin research on gender differences in these effects is sparse. The goal of this study was to examine innate and environmental influences on three components of an empathy scale...