The Cambridge Handbook Of Prosociality

Prosociality is a multifaceted concept referring to the many ways in which individuals care about and benefit others. Human prosociality is foundational to social harmony, happiness, and peace; it is therefore essential to understand its underpinnings, development, and cultivation. This handbook provides a state-of-the-art, in-depth account of scientific, theoretical, and practical knowledge regarding prosociality and its development. Its thirty chapters, written by international researchers in the field, elucidate key issues, including: the development of prosociality across infancy, childhood, adolescence, and beyond; the biological, cognitive, emotional, and motivational mechanisms that underlie and influence prosociality; how different socialization agents and social contexts can affect children's prosociality; and intervention approaches aimed at cultivating prosociality in children and adolescents. This knowledge can benefit researchers, students, practitioners, and policy makers seeking to nurture socially responsible, caring youth.

The Oxford Handbook of Prosocial Behavior provides a comprehensive review of the current literature on when and why people act to benefit others. It provides a comprehensive overview of the field to give both the casual reader and the neophyte to the field some perspective about fundamental questions (what, why, when, and who) relative to prosocial behavior. Taking a multi-level approach, the chapters represent the broad spectrum of this multi-faceted domain. Topics range from micro-level analyses involving evolutionary and comparative psychological factors to macro-level applications, such as reducing intergroup conflicts and ethnic genocide. Between these extremes, the contributors--all internationally recognized in their field--offer their perspectives on developmental processes that may predispose individuals to empathize with and respond to the needs of others, individual differences that seem to interact with situational demands to promote helping, and the underlying motivations of those helping others. They explain volunteerism, intragroup cooperation, and intergroup cooperation to move the analysis from the individual to group-level phenomena. They extend the consideration of this topic to include support of pro-environmental actions, means to encourage participation in medical clinical trials, and the promotion of world peace. The ways that gender, interpersonal relationships, race, and religion might affect decisions to give aid and support to others are also addressed. The final chapter offers a unique view of prosocial behavior that encourages researchers and readers to take an even broader consideration of the field to search for a prosocial consilience.

What kinds of childbearing practices foster the development of helping, sharing, and other prosocial behaviours? What roles do biology and culture play in the development of prosocial behaviour? In this book, Nancy Eisenberg and Paul Mussen review and summarize scholarly research that has been devoted to the development of prosocial behaviour in children, and examine the variety of influences that contribute to children's prosocial development, including the media, parents, peers, biology, culture, personal characteristics, as well as situational determinants. The authors argue that prosocial behaviour can be learned and is modifiable, and they suggest ways that parents, teachers, and other can enhance prosocial development. In addition, the authors attempt to communicate the advances in the study of prosocial development that have taken place over the last decade. The book highlights some questions that have not yet been addressed adequately by researchers, and suggests areas for future work.

There is a growing knowledge base in understanding the differences and similarities between women and men, as well as the diversities among women and sexualities. Although genetic and biological characteristics define human beings conventionally as women and men, their experiences are contextualized in multiple dimensions in terms of gender, sexuality, class, age, ethnicity, and other social dimensions. Beyond the biological and genetic basis of gender differences, gender intersects with culture and other social locations which affect the socialization and development of women across their life span. This handbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date resource to understand the intersectionality of gender differences, to dispel myths, and to examine gender-relevant as well as culturally relevant implications and appropriate interventions. Featuring a truly international mix of contributors, and incorporating cross-cultural research and comparative perspectives, this handbook will inform mainstream psychology of the international literature on the psychology of women and gender.

In the last two years, consumers have experienced massive changes in consumption – whether due to shifts in habits; the changing information landscape; challenges to their identity, or new economic experiences of scarcity or abundance. What can we expect from these experiences? How are the world's leading thinkers applying both foundational knowledge and novel insights as we seek to understand consumer psychology in a constantly changing landscape? And how can informed readers both contribute to and evaluate our knowledge? This handbook offers a critical overview of both fundamental topics in consumer psychology and those that are of prominence in the contemporary marketplace, beginning with an examination of individual psychology and broadening to topics related to wider cultural and marketplace systems. The Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Psychology, 2nd edition, will act as a valuable guide for teachers and graduate and undergraduate students in psychology, marketing, management, economics, sociology, and anthropology.

Summary: "This handbook introduces prosocial education as an umbrella term denoting the various ways in which all players in education impact student development"--

This book, first published in 2007, is an international overview of the state of our knowledge in sociocultural psychology - as a discipline located at the crossroads between the natural and social sciences and the humanities. Since the 1980s, the field of psychology has encountered the growth of a new discipline - cultural psychology - that has built new connections between psychology, sociology, anthropology, history and semiotics. The handbook integrates contributions of sociocultural specialists from fifteen countries, all tied together by the unifying focus on the role of sign systems in human relations with the environment. It emphasizes theoretical and methodological discussions on the cultural nature of human psychological phenomena, moving on to show how meaning is a natural feature of action and how it eventually produces conventional symbols for communication. Such symbols shape individual experiences and create the conditions for consciousness and the self to emerge; turn social norms into ethics; and set history into motion.

This Handbook provides the requisite theoretical and methodological guidelines for undertaking social research addressing relevant contemporary social issues.