Political polarization is often argued to be a major threat to democracy. This article examines whether the two different forms of polarization, ideological and affective, may risk some of the core assumptions of democratic legitimacy. The paper argues that ideological polarization is linked with increasingly radical ideological positions being…

Scholars and Early Childhood Education (ECE) professionals acknowledge the critical nature of prosocial behavior (PSB) skills in the lives of preschool-aged children. Research specifies that children lacking PSBs are socially and academically disadvantaged. Studies have shown that 30% of preschoolers exhibit negative emotional/social behavior, and…

We examined the extent to which children's emotion-sharing relationships were unique from friendships. We also examined the association between emotional experience and emotion sharing as well as the association between emotion sharing and prosocial behavior. Participants were 456 children (M[subscript age] = 10.6 years) from the Midwestern United…

This study investigated how adults over the lifespan flexibly adapt their use of prosocial speech acts when conveying bad news to communicative partners. Experiment 1a (N = 100 Scottish adults aged 18-72 years) assessed whether participants' use of prosocial speech acts varied according to audience design considerations (i.e., whether or not the…

In order to comfort others, children need to exhibit Theory of Mind (ToM) skills. The goal of the present study was to investigate the role of ToM in association with children's spontaneous comforting behaviour in a laboratory task. Forty-seven children between 26 and 57 months of age completed three ToM tasks: diverse desires, diverse beliefs and…

Understanding the factors that motivate defending behaviour from an early age is crucial in informing effective intervention in bullying. However, relatively little is known about the social, emotional, and cognitive factors that predict young children's involvement in defending behaviour. This study investigated the concurrent role of social…

To inform parent-mediated intervention models, this study assessed if family affectedness (i.e., elevated autism symptoms in more than one child) was associated with maternal self-reported social difficulties (as indexed by the Social Responsiveness Scale; SRS-2), and social interactions during play. As part of a prospective study, 71 mothers…

This study examined the mediating effects of cognitive empathy and affective empathy in the relationship between dispositional awe and prosocial behaviour in medical students, and whether perceived stress moderated this association. A total of 631 medical students from two medical tertiary institutions in Liaoning Province, China, participated in…

The point of departure of this article is that hospitality in education has not been theorized in terms of emotion and affect, partly because its law(s) have been discussed in ways that have not paid much attention to the role of emotion and affect. The analysis broadens our understanding of the ethics and politics of hospitality by considering it…

The study examines if African American adolescents' academic self-esteem moderates relations between negative youth experiences and academic achievement. Grounded in a PVEST perspective, the study collected responses from 364 Black adolescents (69% girls) in a southern, urban city. The primary finding in the study confirmed the hypothesis that…

The errors young children make when recognising others' emotions may be systematic over-identification biases and may partially explain the challenges some have socially. These biases and associations may be differential by emotion. In a sample of 871 ethnically and racially diverse preschool-aged children (i.e. 33-68 months; 49% Hispanic/Latine,…

Childhood is marked by profound changes in prosocial behaviour. The underlying motivational mechanisms remain poorly understood. We investigated the development of altruistically motivated helping in middle childhood and the neurocognitive and -affective mechanisms driving this development. One-hundred and twenty seven 6-12 year-old children…

This article engages with the emotional flows of an online, ethnographic doctoral research project taking place in three Toronto drama classrooms during Ontario's longest COVID lockdown. Using conceptualisations of togetherness in drama education, and feminist theories of emotion in virtual and public life, the article reflects on how community in…

With a sample of 470 kindergarten teachers in Hong Kong, this study first examined these teachers' emotion regulation strategies assessed by a newly adapted scale, the Kindergarten Teacher Emotion Regulation Scale. Then, the study adopted a person-centred approach and conducted the latent profile analysis, identifying different profiles of…

On August 3rd, 2019, a racially-charged mass shooting occurred at Walmart in El Paso, TX that killed 23 people and injured another 23. Following the Walmart shooting, students in this borderland region wrote essays related to their experiences. We used the themes we identified to inform implications for teaching writing and composition for middle…