The effect of emotional intensity of shame on children’s prosocial behaviour

ABSTRACT

Research on shame has produced controversial results, with different studies reporting shame promotes, reduces, or has no effect on prosocial behaviour. This experiment examined the effects of the emotional intensity of state shame on the prosocial behaviour of primary-school children in different situations. A total population of 150 fifth-grade children were randomly assigned to neutral-mood, medium-intensity shame, and high-intensity shame conditions, all of whom rated their willingness to directly daily help or donate money in hypothetical situations. The results showed the willingness to donate money was significantly higher in the medium-intensity and high-intensity conditions compared to the neutral-mood condition. However, willingness of daily helping did not differ significantly across the three conditions. These findings indicate the effect of state shame on children’s prosocial behaviour depends on the type of prosocial behaviour and emotional intensity effects, and the state shame matching the situation could be optimal to affect the prosocial behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Shame
• intensity of shame
• prosocial behaviour
• emotional intensity effect

Compliance with Ethical Standards

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, upon reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by The Key Project of Philosophy and Social Science Research in Colleges and Universities in Jiangsu Province (No.2017ZDIXM134) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.31371043).