Celia A. Brownell, PhD
Professor
Department of Psychology
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
brownell@pitt.edu

My research concerns the origins, early development, and sequelae of young children’s social competence. It has three particular foci: cooperative peer relations, prosocial behavior, and body self-awareness, all as they emerge and develop in the first three years of life.

Early Peer Relations

How do children come to be able to cooperate and play together? By age three children engage in extended bouts of cooperative play with one another, featuring complex themes, shared affect, mutual goals, and multiple, reciprocal roles. Picture a small group of three-year-olds playing house together, or a band of four-year-olds setting out to hunt, trap, and dispatch the marauding dinosaur together. Yet a scant two or three years earlier, young toddlers barely notice one another, even in child care settings where they are with familiar playmates for many hours each week. There is remarkably little theoretical or empirical work addressed to questions about the origins and early development of children’s ability to engage in meaningful social exchange with one another, or in their understanding of one another as social partners.

My work has sought to establish the nature of age-related competencies in children’s early cooperative interaction with agemates, as well as to examine likely contributors to these developments. One common thread has been the role played by cognitive and/or social-cognitive development in both normative growth and individual differences in early social competence with peers. I have pursued a number of more specific questions related to these larger themes in small-scale laboratory studies and in the large-scale NICHD Study of Early Child Care on which I have been a co-principal investigator since its inception.

Early Prosocial Behavior

When and how does compassionate caring arise, and what influences children to become more, or less, prosocial? Prosocial behavior is a core aspect of individuals’ well-being and their healthy psychosocial and physical development. As adults, we both share others’ emotions and needs and we care about them. The foundation of human morality lies in this unique ability to relate to others, which is widely argued to serve as the motivational underpinning of interpersonal responsibility and ethical behavior. Our distinctive orientation to others makes human civilization possible, in part by creating and maintaining within-group harmony and cooperation. In short, our emotions connect us to one another, but it is our compassion – our caring about others’ emotions and needs – that promotes prosocial responsiveness and that matters for human society. Although much recent research has been devoted to the origins and early development of antisocial behavior, there is a paucity of work on its complement, the origins of prosocial behavior.

We study prosocial behavior in one- and two-year olds to understand what influences its early development and growth, and what influences some children to behave more (or less) prosocially than others. We have expanded our initial work on early cooperation to include developments in toddlers’ empathy, helping, and sharing behavior. We are especially interested in how young children’s growing self-other understanding relates to caring for and working with others.

Early Body Self-Awareness

When do children begin to think about their bodies as they appear to others -- as distinct objects, with physical characteristics like size, mass, solidity, and extent? In part because we use our bodies to engage one another, we also attend to and think about our own bodies. For example, we adorn our bodies with jewelry, clothing, or make-up; we judge our body’s size and shape as we select clothing to buy; we imagine our body parts and their arrangement while performing T’ai Chi or dancing the tango; and we attend to our body configuration when we use our bodies as tools, perching our children on our shoulders to enable them to see over others’ heads. Thus, we consciously imagine, estimate, and evaluate the form and configuration of our own bodies as they appear to others from the outside.

Infants use their bodies to engage the world – moving through space, watching their own hands and feet, playing with objects and socializing with people. In so doing they begin to discover how their bodies move, what their bodies are capable of, and how their bodies and body parts relate to other things in the world. But only in the second year of life does this implicit, intuitive sense of their own bodies become available to conscious awareness. We have been studying the early development of children’s knowledge of their own body’s size, shape, and structure. This developmental achievement marks the beginning of the child’s representation of his or her own specific three-dimensional shape and appearance and lays the groundwork for the later development of body image and personal identity.

Psychology Department Profile