ArticlePLoS biology2018
The neurodevelopmental precursors of altruistic behavior in infancy.
Article in PLoS biology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Two roads to prosociality.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Social Smiling and Laughter Are Linked to Enhanced Functional Brain Connectivity in Young Infants' Default Mode Network.Developmental psychobiology · 2025Article
- Love on the developing brain: Maternal sensitivity and infants' neural responses to emotion in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.Developmental science · 2024Article
- Observing prosociality and talent: the emotional characteristics and behavioral outcomes of elevation and admiration in 6.5- to 8.5-year-old children.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Dorso-medial prefrontal cortex responses to social smiles predict sociability in early human development.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Effect of Object on Kinesthetic Motor Imagery in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Pilot Study Based on Eye-Tracking Methodology.Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment · 2024Article
- Variability in the expression and perception of positive affect in human infancy.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Maternal recognition of positive emotion predicts sensitive parenting in infancy.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2023Article
- A novel(ty) perspective of fear bias.The Behavioral and brain sciences · 2023Article
- Infant and maternal responses to emotional facial expressions: A longitudinal study.Infant behavior & development · 2023Article
- Frontal asymmetry assessed in infancy using functional near-infrared spectroscopy is associated with emotional and behavioral problems in early childhood.Child development · 2023Article
- Connecting inside out: Development of the social brain in infants and toddlers with a focus on myelination as a marker of brain maturation.Child development · 2022Article
- Depression and Cognitive Impairment: Current Understanding of Its Neurobiology and Diagnosis.Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment · 2022Review
- Social emotional ability development (SEAD): An integrated model of practical emotion-based competencies.Motivation and emotion · 2022Article
- Examining the Role of Socioeconomic Status and Maternal Sensitivity in Predicting Functional Brain Network Connectivity in 5-Month-Old Infants.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- Variability in Infants' Functional Brain Network Connectivity Is Associated With Differences in Affect and Behavior.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2021Article
- Reduced Multivoxel Pattern Similarity of Vicarious Neural Pain Responses in Psychopathy.Journal of personality disorders · 2020Article
- Newborn left amygdala volume associates with attention disengagement from fearful faces at eight months.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2020Article
- Cerebral blood flow in 5- to 8-month-olds: Regional tissue maturity is associated with infant affect.Developmental science · 2020Article
- Impression Formation in the Human Infant Brain.Cerebral cortex communications · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Altruistic behavior is considered a key feature of the human cooperative makeup, with deep ontogenetic roots. The tendency to engage in altruistic behavior varies between individuals and has been linked to differences in responding to fearful faces. The current study tests the hypothesis that this link exists from early in human ontogeny. Using eye tracking, we examined whether attentional responses to fear in others at 7 months of age predict altruistic behavior at 14 months of age. Our analysis revealed that altruistic behavior in toddlerhood was predicted by infants' attention to fearful faces but not happy or angry faces. Specifically, infants who showed heightened initial attention to (i.e., prolonged first look) followed by greater disengagement (i.e., reduced attentional bias over 15 seconds) from fearful faces at 7 months displayed greater prosocial behavior at 14 months of age. Our data further show that infants' attentional bias to fearful faces and their altruistic behavior was predicted by brain responses in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), measured through functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). This suggests that, from early in ontogeny, variability in altruistic helping behavior is linked to our responsiveness to seeing others in distress and brain processes implicated in attentional control. These findings critically advance our understanding of the emergence of altruism in humans by identifying responsiveness to fear in others as an early precursor contributing to variability in prosocial behavior.
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