Response: Commentary: A construct divided: prosocial behavior as helping, sharing, and comforting subtypes

Compliance or empathy-What links maternal sensitivity and toddlers' emotional helping?

Emotional helping-that is, helping based on others' emotional distress-has been suggested to be a central prosocial response to others in need. Developmental theorizing proposed that emotional helping has social origins. Whereas research indeed demonstrated a link between maternal sensitivity and children's emotional helping, developmental theories stress different mediating processes. Emotion-sharing theories claim empathic concern to be the crucial link for helping, whereas internalization theories base children's helping on children's compliance. To investigate these hypotheses, the current study explored empathy and compliance as two possible mediators for the relation between maternal sensitivity and children's emotional helping at 18 months of age. Overall, maternal sensitivity was positively related to children's empathy, children's compliance, and children's emotional helping. Interestingly, children's empathy-but not children's compliance-mediated the link between maternal sensitivity and children's emotional helping. These findings deepen our understanding of the psychological processes subserving emotional helping during infancy and support theories that stress the socioemotional origins of children's prosocial behavior.

Neural basis of prosocial behavior

The ability to behave in ways that benefit other individuals' well-being is among the most celebrated human characteristics crucial for social cohesiveness. Across mammalian species, animals display various forms of prosocial behaviors - comforting, helping, and resource sharing - to support others' emotions, goals, and/or material needs. In this review, we provide a cross-species view of the behavioral manifestations, proximate and ultimate drives, and neural mechanisms of prosocial behaviors. We summarize key findings from recent studies in humans and rodents that have shed light on the neural mechanisms underlying different processes essential for prosocial interactions, from perception and empathic sharing of others' states to prosocial decisions and actions.