The Effect Of Self-loss On Children's Sharing Behavior And Its Overcoming

Pro-social behavior means individual performances are beneficial to others.As a typical performance of pro-social behavior,numerous studies have been conducted on the developmental changes in children's sharing behavior and its influence factors.The theory of evolution suggested that human beings have an innate biological tendency to behaviors that can bring about interests and rewards.That is,beneath their explicit pro-social behaviors,people tried very hard to hide selfish impulse and behavioral intentions.Studies have indicated that,although the development of sharing behavior is early in human life,it is difficult for preschool children to show pro-social behavior that shares valuable resources spontaneously,because they need to control the selfish internal pulse.In daily life,we often encounter failure of self-control,and our self-regulation remains limited and sometimes ineffective.Accordingly,Baumeister and his colleagues proposed the resource(or strength)model of self-control,namely the theory of limited self-control resource.This model casts self-control as an inner capacity that relies on some limited internal resource or energy.The more the resource is,the better the effect of self-control.The energy will become depleted after use-a phenomenon referred to as ego depletion-and result in the further self-regulation breakdown.Recently,the process model further proposes that depletion is people experienced a shift in motivational orientation and attentional focus that together combined to undermine self-control and triggered self-control failure.At present,researches on ego-depletion and its after-effect mostly use teenagers or adults(such as college students)as subjects,then what about the smaller children? A substantial developmental growth in self-regulation is observed between the ages of 3 and 5 years,and is closely associated with the development of neural networks in prefrontal cortex and the inhibit function of cerebral cortex during the early years.Theoretically,due to the limitation of resources in self-control,each individual is likely to be in a state of ego-depletion,especially for those preschool children who are too small to gain higher level of self-regulation.Based on these considerations,in experiment 1,we used dual-task paradigm including "resistance to temptation" situation and seven consecutive sharing tasks to explore the effects of ego-depletion on preschool children's sharing behavior.All participants were randomly selected from the kindergarten affiliated to a normal university.If ego-depletion will undermine the children's altruistic sharing behavior,then can this negative effect be counteracted by some external intervention? Based on experiment 1,experiment 2 aimed to investigate whether these negative after-effects of ego-depletion on children's altruistic sharing behavior can be overcome by the lead of fairness,egocentric and altruistic clues.The results indicated that:(1)The task paradigm of "resistance to temptation" can be effectively applied to the research of children's ego-depletion.Consistent with previous research that all participants behaved altruistically,and ego-depletion made children more likely to act selfishly in the sharing situation.(2)The effects of ego-depletion on children's altruistic sharing behavior affected the middle class children most,followed by children from the bottom class,and had no obvious influence on the top class children.(3)The guidance of fairness had no effect about children's altruistic behavior on the state of ego-depletion.The remission of altruistic priming about ego-depletion effect on altruistic behavior was limited.And the egocentric clues will embolden the after-effects of ego-depletion.