New York Magazine:
Altruistic behavior toward strangers, a growing body of research has found, brings with it emotional and health benefits. This can help explain what has traditionally been seen as the “mysterious” aspect of the behavior — why help someone you don’t even know or really care about? But as Jonas G. Miller, Sarah Kahle, and Paul D. Hastings of UC – Davis write in a new paper just published in Psychological Science, “less is known about the possible benefits … of altruism in earlier childhood.”
To learn more about this, the researchers got a group of 74 preschoolers together for an experiment. “By completing a variety of activities over the course of almost 2 [hours], each child gradually earned 20 prize tokens, which were kept for the child in a token box.” During this period, the kids had electrodes attached to their torsos to measure their physiological responses.
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