Elsevier

Current Opinion in Psychology

Volume 44, April 2022, Pages 220-225
Current Opinion in Psychology

Review
Prosocial development in adolescence

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.09.020Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Abstract

In this review, we describe the development of prosocial behavior in adolescence as a critical inflection period for social adjustment. Experimental research using prosocial giving tasks demonstrates that adolescents differentiate more between recipients and contexts, suggesting increasing ingroup-outgroup differentiation during adolescence. We also demonstrate that social brain development during adolescence is partly driven by environmental influences, further underlining adolescence as a critical period for social development. The COVID-19 pandemic has had and will have long-term effects on the current generation of adolescents, for which we describe both the risks, resilience factors, and opportunities for engaging in prosocial acts of kindness.

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