masterThesis
Avaliação da pró-socialidade materna como modelo para a prósocialidade em crianças
Fecha
2018-04-26Registro en:
SOARES, Elenice. Avaliação da pró-socialidade materna como modelo para a prósocialidade em crianças. 2018. 69f. Dissertação (Mestrado em Psicobiologia) - Centro de Biociências, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, 2018.
Autor
Soares, Elenice
Resumen
Evolutionary Psychology (EP) is a perspective that starts from the knowledge about the
Theory of Evolution and uses them to seek to understand the behaviors and the human mind.
It’s originated from elements of cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology, covering both
biological and cultural aspects. The fundamental tenet of EP is that the human brain is shaped
to solve issues related to survival and reproduction. To understand this it is necessary to keep
in mind that the brain has been shaped over time in the so-called Evolutionary Adaptive
Environment, that is, the environment where our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived. This
environment had characteristics different from those currently found; the search for food
possibly demanded more energy expenditure, the groups were smaller and with more related
individuals, which increased the probability of cooperation between the individuals and made
it easier to identify who was not collaborating for the common good, called free riders. In this
context, some mechanisms were developed to deal with the occurrence of free riders in the
group, such as kinship selection, reciprocal altruism and indirect reciprocity. In addition to
these mechanisms, studies that include the understanding of cooperation from ontogeny add
important elements related to the development context of the individual. Such studies aim to
identify the modulating factors and how they influence the prosocial behavior of children by
making possible comparisons among several of these factors, such as: gender, age, individual
characteristics, as well as parental and cultural influences. In order to investigate whether
there was influence of the maternal prosocial behaviors and the perception of this prosociality
in the prosocial behaviors presented by the children, the study was conducted in Natal / RN
and had the participation of 71 dyads composed of children between seven and eleven years
old and their mothers. The mothers answered a self-report questionnaire about their prosocial
behavior (BPP) and the questionnaire for sociodemographic characterization of the
participants. The children answered a questionnaire about their perception of the prosocial
behaviors of their mothers and participated in a round of the dictator's game as a behavioral
measure of prosociality. Some similarities and differences were observed between the
children's perception in relation to that reported by their mothers. In three factors (out of a
total of seven), the means of mothers and children did not differ significantly, indicating that
in these factors, children may be easier to identify the behaviors performed by them. The
model created to investigate which variables influenced the prosocial behavior of the children explained 30% of the variation of the data, with one of the factors of BPP (Reasoning Related
to the Other) and age presenting main effect, which requires more in-depth studies to
investigate other variables that influence this behavior. Finally, children who demonstrated
more prosocial behavior took less time to decide on donation, indicating that prosocial
behavior may require less rationalization and would be more intuitive than pro-self behavior.