Helping as prosocial practice: Longitudinal relations among children’s shyness, helping behavior, and empathic response

Although shyness has been found to be a concurrent constraint on young children's empathy and instrumental helping, there is limited evidence to suggest that this temperamental profile has longitudinal effects on prosocial behaviors. Here, we examined the concurrent and longitudinal relations between children's shyness and prosocial behaviors, as well as the intervening impact of instrumental helping behavior on later empathic response in …