Development of Prosocial Behavior and Empathy
In the Hand that Rocks the Cradle

Abstract: Theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that a mother has a paramount role in the development of her child’s prosocial behavior in general, and in the enhancement of her child’s empathic understanding of others in particular.  Evidence for this can be drawn from the evolutionary theory of parental investment, as well as infant’s preference for the maternal voice soon after birth, and infant’s ability to imitate facial expression and motor mimicry. In addition, recent findings on human mirror neurons, mother-infant attachment and the affect regulation support the notion that the hand that rocks the cradle holds the key to the gate of prosocial behavior and empathic understanding of others.

“The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.”
   A popular cliche

“Mother’s love will cure society’s ills.”
  Jean Jacques Rousseau (cited in Kagan)^1,p.54

Introduction

Most often scholars of human behavior have focused on abnormal personality development.  As a result, positive aspects of personality, such as prosocial behavior and empathy, have not received sufficient empirical attention.  Prosocial behavior involves an ability to recognize people’s expressions, feelings and emotions with an altruistic motivation to help.  Empathy, as the foundation of prosocial behavior, is defined as understanding inner experiences and perspectives of others, and communicating this understanding.²

It is now accepted beyond doubt that physical, mental and social well-being of infants is influenced by events during pregnancy and birth, and in early experiences with the primary care-giver and the environment in which they grow.  What the expectant mother drinks, eats, breathes or feels can have a profound effect on the fetus’ developing brain.³  For centuries people speculated about the effects of maternal behavior and emotions during pregnancy and influence of the intrauterine environment on the developing fetus.  For example, it is now well-known that a pregnant woman’s alcohol consumption, smoking, and malnutrition can cause fetal malformation, premature birth, and learning disabilities in the new born infant.  Maternal hormones, altered by stress and emotional status can act directly on the brain of the developing fetus through the endocrine and central nervous system.

Human beings are born with a need for attachment and affiliation; a need to be felt and understood.  The human infant is totally dependent on the availability of a lovingly responsive care-giver to optimally satisfy all physical and emotional needs.

Although a lovingly responsive care-giver can always satisfy an infant’s needs to survive, but the biological mother is the most adequate care-giver for optimal development of prosocial and empathic behavior of the child for the following reasons:

Maternal Investment:  It has been observed that in almost all mammalian species, the mother is often more involved in the child rearing, thereby investing more than any other care-giver, including the father in this endeavor.⁴  In addition to psychological and hormonal factors, evolutionary scholars have suggested other reasons for a greater maternal investment in child rearing.  For example, in the human attempt to preserve their genes (DNAs) through procreation, women compared to men, have much fewer gametes (one ovum per four weeks during limited fertility period versus millions of sperms per ejaculation). The scarcity of resources (gametes) leads to a greater protection (investment) of the offspring by the mother.

Furthermore, for the mother, pregnancy involves nine months of carrying the fetus, followed by several years of nourishing and rearing.^5,6  Due to internal gestation, pregnancy and child birth, maternal certainty (mother’s confidence for being the biological mother) has historically been much greater than paternal certainly (father’s confidence for being the biological father of the child) leading to a greater maternal investment.^4-6  Mothers also have the advantage of the additional parental investment associated with lactation (breast feeding) for a relatively long time after birth.⁵

Based on the evolutionary theory of maternal investment, women are believed to develop more caring attitudes toward their offspring than men.⁴  This females caring quality can be generalized to others as well.⁷  The gender-specific caring quality was also noticed by Darwin who stated that: “Woman seem to differ from man in her greater tenderness and less selfishness. Woman, owing to her maternal instincts, displays these qualities toward her infants in an eminent degree; therefore, it is likely that she would often extent them toward her fellow creatures.”⁸  In our own studies with medical students and physicians, women always outscored men on an empathy scale.^2,9,10

Maternal Voice Preference:  Prenatal experiences significantly influence the newborn’s earliest voice preferences.  It is believed that the fetus can hear the mother’s voice.  In general, newborns prefer female voices over male’s.  In particular, human newborns can recognize the mother’s voice and prefer the mother’s voice over any other human voice including the father’s voice.^11,12  The infant’s preference for mother’s voice has been demonstrated in experiments through the use of a non-nutritive nipple attached to an electronic recorder which monitors the rate and amplitude of an infant’s sucking patterns.¹¹  Infants suck longer to the maternal voice.¹²

Facial Imitation and Motor Mimicry:  From early on, the infant becomes involved in somewhat “telepathic” exchanges with the mother¹³ by paying attention to the expressions on the mother’s face. These exchanges contribute to the development of understanding one’s self and other’s emotional status.¹⁴  Nature has given a gift to human infants to understand others by proving them with an imitative brain.

In a landmark experiment, it was shown that infants between 12 and 21 days of age can imitate facial gestures.¹⁵  This early ability has important implications for theories to describe the genesis of cognitive development and prosocial behavior.  The mechanism involved in infant ability for imitation can provide the foundation for understanding others and the theory of mind including prosocial behavior and empathy.¹⁶  Also, children are capable of motor mimicry that has been conceptualized as a kind of primitive empathy.¹⁷

Evidence in support of the infant’s understanding of maternal emotion was provided by using the “still face” procedure (showing no facial emotion).  After the mother faced her child with normal playful exchanges, she changed to showing no expression on her face.  As a result, the child became surprised by the emotionless face of the mother, and made efforts to get the mother’s attention.  After unsuccessful attempt to change the mother’s “still face” the infants became distressed and showed a kind of indifferent (apathetic) behavior.¹⁸

Babys’ understanding of mothers’ emotions was also demonstrated in an experiment in which young infants used their mothers’ emotional expression to navigate a “visual cliff” (a sheet of glass over which the baby crawls, under which a bottomless cliff appear in the midway). The infants looked at their mothers, before crawling on the glass to get the toy on the other side of the visual cliff.  When mothers displayed fear, no infant crossed the cliff, but when mothers showed joy, about two-thirds of infants crossed the cliff to get the toy.^{18, p.244}

Infants’ capability of imitating facial expression, motor mimicry capability, and understanding the mother’s emotions suggests that infants have a remarkable ability to communicate nonverbally in the early days of life.  This can provide a foundation for the development of a capacity to share subjective states with others¹⁹ and fosters understanding of other people’s happiness as well as pain and suffering. 

Mirror Neurons: Our capacity to understand others is deeply grounded in the nature of our interactions with others. In a series of recent experiments, it has been shown that the same neural structures in the brain that are involved in processing actions are also active when the same actions are simply observed.^20,21

It appears that a whole range of different “mirror” matching mechanism is present in the brain which activated the “mirror neurons.”²⁰  The mirror neurons are discharged similarly when a person makes a particular action, and when she/he observes another individual making a similar action.  By using functional brain imaging, it has been shown that such a system of mirror neurons, that was first discovered in monkeys, also exists in humans’ brains.²⁰  The mechanism of mirror neurons is innate, and constitutes a basic organizational feature of our brain that can cause a set of neurons to “fire together” by observation of the mother’s behavior, and subsequently “wire together” in later stages of development.  It has been proposed that the mirror neuron activation could be the basis of action recognition²¹ and this mechanism can sow the seeds for understanding others and thus development of empathy in children. ²²

Mother-Child Attachment: The intense affection of the mother-child relationship is described as a behavioral system that has survival value.²³  It a series of experiments, it was demonstrated that mother-infant bonding can be strongly formed immediately after birth at the heightened emotional arousal of the mother byskin-to-skin contact between the mother and her new born.²⁴ 

For the infant, the mother is perceived as a “secure base” from which to explore the world if she is constantly available on demand, and is lovingly responsive to the infant’s needs.  In this case, the infant develops a “secure” attachment to the mother and perceive the world as a friendly place; otherwise, the mother-child attachment would be “insecure” and the world is perceived as a hostile territory.^23,25

The quality of mother-child attachment can serve as an “internal working model” that can stay with the individual from the cradle to the grave and can be generalized to interpersonal relationships in adulthood.^23,25-27  Such early experiences are extremely important in the development of prosocial and antisocial behavior in adulthood because of their contribution to forming a mental representation of the world, or psychological “script” that become motivational factors in an adult’s behavior.^18,28  It has been demonstrated that attachment relationships with the mother in childhood have a significant link to interpersonal relationships, particularly in romantic relationships.²⁹

The quality of mother-child attachment plays a central role in the development of prosocial behavior in general and in promoting empathic concern in particular.³⁰  An attachment relationship forms a blueprint for future relationships. The emotional mother-child bond enables the child to emotionally connect with other people throughout life. The affect regulation plays a central role in the attachment theory³¹ that will be described later. 

It is suggested that strong mother-child attachment is a major antecedent of early interest in others and can be a necessary precondition for the development of empathy.^{32,pp.169-170}  Early affectively charged experiences in relationships with the mother provide a foundation for our capacity for prosocial behavior in general, and for empathic understanding of others in particular.¹⁸  Children appear to develop a capacity for understanding and responding to other’s distress within the context of early relationships.³³  According to Schore^34,35 empathy is rooted in the early psychobiological attunement between mother and child.

Affect Regulation:  Affect plays an important role in organizing, motivating, and sustaining behavior and in the creation of meaning to experiences.¹⁸  Human infants are well-equipped to become social because they are endowed with an affect system which is the foundation for the development of social behavior.

Regulation of affect is a mechanism to achieve desired internal states for optimal social relationships. It has been proposed that the mother serves as an affect regulator, by providing a supplementary context for the infant’s underdeveloped brain.³⁶  The social and emotional environment and the quality of mother-infant attachment are important in fostering the infant’s self-regulation capacities.¹⁸  Affect is a primary medium of social relationships, an element in nonverbal communication. While affect plays an important role in prosocial behavior, its regulation is believed to have an essential role in empathic exchanges.³⁷

Prosocial Behavior and Empathy

Charles Darwin proclaimed that for the sake of survival, human beings are biologically equipped to behave socially and cooperatively.⁸  Prosocial, sharing and helping behavior, as well as altruism and empathy are all overlapping concepts that have common social and developmental roots.³⁸  The literature on relationships between empathy and prosocial behavior suggests that the two concepts are closely related and are influenced to a great deal by early relationship experiences.³⁹

In empirical studies scores on empathy measures were found to be significant predictors of prosocial behavior in middle childhood.⁴⁰  Also, empathic care-giving by mothers was found to be positively associated with children’s altruism.⁴¹  Empathy is a major determinant of prosocial and altruistic behavior.^42,43  Prosocial behavior is empathic when it is based on altruistic motivation. Sometimes an individual pays a great personal cost for such altruistically motivated behavior. Other forms of prosocial behaviors may be based on egoistic motivation to reduce personal distress. 

More than four decades ago Allport⁴⁴ proposed that human personality can be viewed as a system.  According to the tenet of the theory, a system consists of a set of subsystems and a set of elements within each subsystem.  The combined function of interacting elements in the system generates a totality, or gestalt,⁴⁵ where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  Such a system is fully functional when there is a harmony or synchronization among all elements within and between the subsystems.  Otherwise, the system becomes dysfunctional.  In fact, any dysfunctional element can make the entire system dysfunctional. The systems theory⁴⁶ can provide a comprehensive framework to present a paradigm for mother-child relationship. 

I propose that the system of the mother-child relationship is composed of biological, psychological and social subsystems with their own dynamic interacting elements.  The biological mother cannot be replaced with any other figure due to the function of biological subsystem which includes elements such as internal gestation, biological and hormonal events during pregnancy and birth, infant’s preference of mother’s voice, lactation and breast feeding.  Nature bestowed these privileges only to the biological mother and no one else.

In addition, elements of the psychosocial subsystems of the mother-child relationship such as the notions of maternal investment, preservation of genes and parental certainty, suggest that the biological mother is the most appropriate care-giver for the most beneficial developmental outcomes.  Maternal physical and emotional unavailability can lead to a dysfunctional system that can have serious consequences for the individual and the society, including diminished prosocial and empathic behaviors.  As John Bowlby proclaimed,⁴⁷ an absence of emotion and a lack of remorse (both are relevant to prosocial behavior and empathy) could be among the consequences of maternal unavailability.  Therefore, it can be concluded that the mother’s hand that rocks the cradle, sow the seeds of prosocial behavior and empathy.

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