Child and parent characteristics that predict toddlers' help-seeking and help-giving reactions to a stranger's distress

Two laboratory assessments were conducted with toddlers aged 18 and 30 months and their parents examining how toddlers react to a stranger showing pain and distress, with 247 and 216 families participating in the 1 st and 2nd assessments, respectively. Three main research questions were addressed: (1) whether pathways between parental characteristics and child reactions were mediated through child self-regulation, (2) whether child self-regulation moderated pathways between parental characteristics and child reactions, and (3) whether child emotion knowledge moderated pathways between child self-regulation and child reactions.; Results were consistent with the notion that child self-regulation partially mediated the pathways from parental support and parental distress to child help-seeking and distressed reactions. As expected, parental support fostered, whereas parental distress (even when accounting for consistency in measures) impaired child self-regulatory capacities. Unexpectedly, vagal suppression (theorized to index emotion regulation) did not cohere with other measures of regulation. However, vagal measures were related to child reactions (with findings often differing by sex). Findings suggest that baseline vagal measures partially tapped surgency or approach (e.g., physical or verbal help) rather than avoidance or inhibition to novel and distressing situations (e.g., help-seeking from parent or personal distress). Also unexpected was that child self-regulation was positively linked to help-seeking and personal distress. However, auxiliary analyses revealed that measurement of child self-regulation likely captured aspects of reactive behavioral inhibition. Nonetheless, results suggest that parenting could foster or hinder children's development of effortful and reactive control which then biases children toward particular patterns of empathy-related responding. In contrast, there was limited evidence to support that self-regulation moderated the pathways from parental characteristics to child reactions. Finally, no evidence suggested that emotion knowledge moderated the pathways from child self-regulation to child reactions. Nonetheless, interesting relations were found between emotion knowledge and parenting measures that differed by sex. For boys, parenting might especially play an important role in teaching the child about the meanings of emotional experiences and expressions. For girls, parenting was less directly associated with emotion knowledge. Rather, empathic understanding predicted scores on emotion knowledge one year later. Particularly for girls, data suggests that early empathic understanding might lay the foundation for later emotion knowledge because both involve empathic (e.g., socio-emotional) and/or socio-cognitive capacities and skills.