"The protective role of early prosocial behaviors against young Turkish children’s later internalizing and externalizing problems"

Postdoctoral scholar Zehra Gülseven is lead author, with Professor Gustavo Carlo second author, of an article in the European Journal of Developmental Psychology on the impact of prosocial behaviors on children’s behavior.
 
The title of the article “The protective role of early prosocial behaviors against young Turkish children’s later internalizing and externalizing problems.”
 
Co-authors are Professor Asiye Kumru (Ozyegin University, Istanbul), Professor Melike Sayil (TED University, Ankara), and Professor Bilge Selçuk (Koc University, Istanbul).

Zehra Gülseven

Gustavo Carlo

Gülseven's research focuses on parental, cultural, and contextual correlates of prosocial behaviors and moral development in children and adolescents. She is collaborating with Drs. Sandra Simpkins, Deborah Vandell, Jacquelynne Eccles, and Nicole Zarrett in the Templeton Character Development Project to explore the development of five character virtues including prosocial behavior, cooperative behavior, self-control, emotion regulation, and hard work from childhood through adolescence. Gülseven received her B.S. in Psychology from Abant İzzet Baysal University, in Turkey and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Science from the University of Missouri. 

Carlo’s primary research interest focuses on understanding positive social development and health in culturally diverse children and adolescents. Many of his projects focus on U.S. ethnic/racial groups, including Latino/a youth and families. He has published more than 200 books, chapters, and research papers. He currently serves as a member of the Society for Research in Child Development Governing Council, as associate editor of the International Journal of Behavioral Development, and as co-editor of the upcoming APA Handbook of Adolescent Development. Carlo serves as director of UCI’s Cultural Resilience and Learning Center.
 
Abstract
 
This study examined the protective roles of early prosocial behaviours (at age 4) on later internalizing and externalizing problems (at age 6) and to what extent emotion regulation skills (at age 5) mediated these longitudinal associations in children from Turkey. Participants were 293 Turkish preschool children (Mage = 49.01 months; 141 girls). Results showed that higher prosocial behaviours at age 4 were linked to higher emotion regulation at age 5, which, in turn, was linked to less internalizing problems at age 6. Additionally, prosocial behaviours at age 4 were negatively linked to emotional lability at age 5, which, in turn, was positively linked to externalizing problems at age 6. We also found that higher prosocial behaviours at age 4 were directly and negatively linked to both internalizing and externalizing problems at age 6. These results were robust for boys and girls and children who lived in big and small cities. Overall, there was supportive evidence on the protective roles of earlier prosocial behaviours on later internalizing and externalizing problems. These findings extend existing models of risk and resilience to a sample of children from a non-Western, relatively collectivist-oriented culture and inform our understanding of these posited relations in young children.
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