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Young children robustly distinguish between moral norms and conventional norms (Smetana, 1984; Yucel et al., 2020). In existing research, norms about the fair distribution of resources are by definition considered part of the moral domain; they are not distinguished from other moral norms such as those involving physical harm. Yet an understanding of fairness in resource distribution (hereafter, "fairness") emerges late in development and is culturally variable, raising the possibility that fairness may not fall squarely in the moral domain. In 2 preregistered studies, we examined whether U.S. American children who were primarily White see fairness as a moral or conventional norm. In study 1 (N = 96), we did not obtain the established moral-conventional difference needed to investigate questions about the status of fairness. We improved our design in our second preregistered study. In study 2 (N = 94), 4-year-olds rated moral transgressions (e.g., hitting) as more serious than fairness and conventional transgressions (e.g., wearing pajamas to school), but importantly, they rated fairness and conventional transgressions as similarly serious. In contrast, 6- and 8-year-olds rated moral transgressions as more serious than fairness and conventional transgressions, and fairness as more serious than conventional transgressions. An additional, forced-choice procedure revealed that most 6-year-olds also categorized fairness with moral rather than conventional transgressions; 4- and 8-year-olds' responses on this measure did not show systematic patterns. U.S. American children may not equate norms of fairness in resource distribution with harm-based moral norms, even into middle childhood.

Gratitude is a positive social emotion that one experiences when one has benefited from another person's goodwill (McCullough, 2002). Feeling gratitude urges the grateful person to reciprocate and respond prosocially, thereby solidifying cooperation. Yet little prior research has focused on the social functions of displaying gratitude, namely to convey that a grateful recipient is likely to be a reliable and trustworthy cooperative partner. The present study examined when in development children become sensitive to these important functions of gratitude displays. The sample consisted of 4-year-old (n = 20; 10 girls) and 5-year-old children (n = 20; 10 girls) from families in the United States that were predominantly White and college educated. Children watched videos of two beneficiaries receiving gifts from a benefactor. One beneficiary showed gratitude, whereas the other was positive but nongrateful. As predicted, 5-year-olds preferred the grateful recipient, thought the benefactor would also prefer her, thought she would be more likely to reciprocate, and distributed more resources to her. The 4-year-olds' responses showed some of the same patterns as those of the 5-year-olds but were less systematic. These findings provide the first evidence that as early as the preschool years, gratitude displays elicit affiliation and cooperation, even among bystanders, and thus serve vital social and cooperative functions.

The 3 papers by Hammond and Drummond (2019), LoBue and Adolph (2019), and Stern, Botdorf, Cassidy, and Riggins (2019) bring into focus some of the exciting and promising new directions emerging in the field of emotional development. This commentary urges researchers moving in these new directions to leverage what is already known about emotional development to inform future predictions and interpretations, as well as to remain mindful of the thorny but essential questions surrounding the conceptualization, measurement, and interpretation of emotions. These points are illustrated with a focus on 2 specific topics. The first concerns how we conceptualize positive and negative emotions and what we might predict about their respective psychological and behavioral effects. The second concerns what should (not) count as evidence of an emotion in infants and young children and highlights the importance of converging evidence across methods and measures as well as of validating measures. This extends to the study of emotional mechanisms such as empathy and sympathy. Considering these questions carefully at this juncture has the potential to make the future study of emotional development all the more fruitful and effective.

Much is known about young children's helping behavior, but little is known about the underlying motivations and emotions involved. In 2 studies we found that 2-year-old children showed positive emotions of similar magnitude--as measured by changes in their postural elevation using depth sensor imaging technology--after they achieved a goal for themselves and after they helped another person achieve her goal. Conversely, children's posture decreased in elevation when their actions did not result in a positive outcome. These results suggest that for young children, working for themselves and helping others are similarly rewarding.

Prosocial behavior is versatile, multifaceted, and complex. This special section seeks to advance coherent, integrative understanding of prosocial development by addressing this topic through the prism of motivations. This conceptual Introduction presents key ideas that provide a framework for thinking about motivation for prosocial behavior and its development. It outlines the evolutionary roots of prosocial behavior, underscoring the interdependent roles of nature and nurture. This is followed by a discussion of several key psychological mechanisms reflecting different motivations for prosocial action (empathy for a distressed other, concern about another's goal, desire to act in accordance with internalized prosocial norms, and guilt). We discuss the critical components of each motivation and highlight pertinent contributions of the special section articles.

Children's instrumental helping has sometimes been interpreted as a desire to complete action sequences or to restore the physical order of things. Two-year-old children (n = 51) selectively retrieved for an adult the object he needed rather than one he did not (but which equally served to restore the previous order of things), and those with greater internal arousal (i.e., pupil dilation) were faster to help. In a second experiment (n = 64), children's arousal increased when they witnessed an adult respond inappropriately to another adult's need. This was not the case in a nonsocial control condition. These findings suggest that children's helping is not aimed at restoring the order of things but rather at seeing another person's need fulfilled.

Guilt serves vital prosocial functions: It motivates transgressors to make amends, thus restoring damaged relationships. Previous developmental research on guilt has not clearly distinguished it from sympathy for a victim or a tendency to repair damage in general. The authors tested 2- and 3-year-old children (N = 62 and 64, respectively) in a 2 × 2 design, varying whether or not a mishap caused harm to someone and whether children themselves caused that mishap. Three-year-olds showed greatest reparative behavior when "they" had caused the mishap "and" it caused harm, thus showing a specific effect of guilt. Two-year-olds repaired more whenever harm was caused, no matter by whom, thus showing only an effect of sympathy. Guilt as a distinct motivator of prosocial behavior thus emerges by at least 3 years.

Three-year-old children saw an adult displaying the exact same distress in 3 different conditions: (a) the adult's distress was appropriate to a genuine harm, (b) the adult's distress was an overreaction to a minor inconvenience, and (c) there was no apparent cause for the adult's distress. Children who witnessed the adult being appropriately upset showed concern for him, intervened on his behalf, and checked on him when he later expressed distress out of their view. Children who did not know the cause for the adult's distress responded similarly. In contrast, children who witnessed the adult overreacting to an inconvenience showed lower rates of intervening and checking. The degree of children's concern across conditions was correlated with the latency of their helping behavior toward the adult later. These results suggest that from an early age, young children's sympathy and prosocial behavior are not automatic responses to emotional displays but, rather, involve taking into account whether the displayed distress is justified. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

Displaying guilt after a transgression serves to appease the victim and other group members, restore interpersonal relationships, and indicate the transgressors' awareness of and desire to conform to the group's norms. We investigated whether and when young children are sensitive to these functions of guilt displays. In Study 1, after 4- and 5-year-old children watched videos of transgressors either displaying guilt (without explicitly apologizing) or not displaying guilt, 5-year-olds appropriately inferred that the victim would be madder at the unremorseful transgressor and would prefer the remorseful transgressor. They also said that they would prefer to interact with the remorseful transgressor, judged the unremorseful transgressor to be meaner, and, in a distribution of resources task, gave more resources to the remorseful transgressor. The 4-year-olds did not draw any of these inferences and distributed the resources equally. However, Study 2 showed that 4-year-olds were able to draw appropriate inferences about transgressors who explicitly apologized versus those who did not apologize. Thus, 4-year-olds seem to know the appeasement functions that explicit apologies serve but only when children have reached the age of 5 years do they seem to grasp the emotions that apologies stand for, namely, guilt and remorse, and the appeasement functions that displaying these emotions serve. (Contains 1 footnotes, 3 tables, and 2 figures.)

To learn from conspecifics, infants would be greatly advantaged by knowing when to seek information from them. Although in prior work infants used a labeler's gaze direction to infer the referent of a novel label, it was unclear whether infants in these studies recognized that they needed information or were happening upon the information by simply orienting to the labeler's voice. To address this issue, we presented 13- and 18-month-olds with either one or two novel objects and provided a novel label. If infants seek referential information, they should look more to the labeler in the presence of two objects relative to one object, because the labeler's intended referent is highly ambiguous in the two-object case. This prediction was confirmed in two studies. In contrast, infants' looking was equivalent in the presence of one vs. two objects in a baseline phase, when no labels were provided. Thus, 13- and 18-month-olds actively seek clarifying gaze information to resolve ambiguous learning situations. Word learning appears to be a rich pragmatic process as early as the end of the first year of life.

Two studies investigated whether young children are selectively prosocial toward others, based on the others' moral behaviors. In Study 1 (N = 54), 3-year-olds watched 1 adult (the actor) harming or helping another adult. Children subsequently helped the harmful actor less often than a third (previously neutral) adult, but helped the helpful and neutral adults equally often. In Study 2 (N = 36), 3-year-olds helped an actor who intended but failed to harm another adult less often than a neutral adult, but helped an accidentally harmful and a neutral adult equally often. Children's prosocial behavior was thus mediated by the intentions behind the actor's moral behavior, irrespective of outcome. Children thus selectively avoid helping those who cause--or even intend to cause--others harm.

In most research on the early ontogeny of sympathy, young children are presented with an overtly distressed person and their responses are observed. In the current study, the authors asked whether young children could also sympathize with a person to whom something negative had happened but who was expressing no emotion at all. They showed 18- and 25-month-olds an adult either harming another adult by destroying or taking away her possessions (harm condition) or else doing something similar that did not harm her (neutral condition). The "victim" expressed no emotions in either condition. Nevertheless, in the harm as compared with the neutral condition, children showed more concern and subsequent prosocial behavior toward the victim. Moreover, children's concerned looks during the harmful event were positively correlated with their subsequent prosocial behavior. Very young children can sympathize with a victim even in the absence of overt emotional signals, possibly by some form of affective perspective taking. (Contains 1 footnote, 3 tables, and 1 figure.)

There is ample empirical evidence for an asymmetry in the way that adults use positive versus negative information to make sense of their world; specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information. This bias is argued to serve critical evolutionarily adaptive functions, but its developmental presence and ontogenetic emergence have never been seriously considered. The authors argue for the existence of the negativity bias in early development and that it is evident especially in research on infant social referencing but also in other developmental domains. They discuss ontogenetic mechanisms underlying the emergence of this bias and explore not only its evolutionary but also its developmental functions and consequences. Throughout, the authors suggest ways to further examine the negativity bias in infants and older children, and they make testable predictions that would help clarify the nature of the negativity bias during early development. (Contains 8 footnotes and 1 table.)

In Study 1, 7-month-old infants (N = 58) looked reliably more at an adult's face when she playfully pulled a toy away from them compared with when she simply handed them the toy. In Study 2, 7- and 9-month-old infants (N = 36) interacted with an adult who played a teasing game and then held a neutral or happy facial expression. Compared with a baseline in which infants looked equally to both expressions, after the tease, infants looked longer at the neutral compared with the happy expression. By 7 months, infants may use facial expressions to disambiguate others' actions.

In two studies, the reason that infants in a novel situation look to adults was assessed. In Study 1, 10- and 13-month-old infants encountered a visual cliff that was deep (56 cm) or ambiguous (20 cm). Infants crossed the ambiguous cliff reliably faster than the deep cliff, and the first looks to mother of infants in the deep cliff condition were longer than those of infants in the ambiguous cliff condition. In Study 2, infants on an ambiguous cliff were tested either in a condition in which the mother was looking at the cliff (face plus voice) or away from the cliff (voice only) while encouraging the infants to cross. Infants' crossing times and looks to mother did not differ as a function of condition. In the two other conditions, infants' looks to mother and duration to cross were assessed when no cues were provided (no cues) or when the mother was providing information to an adult (talk to adult). Compared with the number of infants in the face plus voice and voice only conditions, the number of infants who became fussy in the no cues and talk to adult conditions was reliably greater. Those infants who crossed the cliff in the no cues and talk to adult conditions crossed as fast as infants in the other two conditions. The discussion focuses on the meaning of infants' first looks and on infants' understanding of cues that are intended for them versus for someone else.

To examine the influences of facial versus vocal cues on infants' behavior in a potentially threatening situation, 12-month-olds on a visual cliff received positive facial-only, vocal-only, or both facial and vocal cues from mothers. Infants' crossing times and looks to mother were assessed. Infants crossed the cliff faster with multimodal and vocal than with facial cues, and looked more to mother in the Face Plus Voice compared to the Voice Only condition. The findings suggest that vocal cues, even without a visual reference, are more potent than facial cues in guiding infants' behavior. The discussion focuses on the meaning of infants' looks and the role of voice in development of social cognition.