Choosing to encourage or discourage: perceived effectiveness of prescriptive versus proscriptive messages.

The estimated cost of repairing damage caused to recreational sites annually is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. These depreciative activities also reduce the quality of visitors' experiences in the damaged areas. Indirect methods, such as visitor education through brochures and signs, continue to be the least controversial management approaches to depreciative acts. Yet, the literature on studies examining the most effective message presentations remains sparse. A survey mailed to randomly selected National Association for Interpretation members assessed the perceived effectiveness of communications that encouraged positive conduct (prescriptive messages) versus those that discouraged negative conduct (proscriptive messages) in wildland and urban settings. Almost invariably, respondents viewed the encouragement-based prescriptive messages as more effective than the discouragement-based proscriptive messages. This finding stands in sharp contrast to an earlier study that discovered a preponderance of proscriptive versus prescriptive messages on signs in both wildland and urban recreational environments. Thus, although the great majority of interpreters see the encouragement of positive conduct as more effective, in practice, messages on signs are much more likely to discourage negative conduct. Reasons for this discrepancy are considered.

Reinterpreting the empathy-altruism relationship: when one into one equals oneness.

Important features of the self-concept can be located outside of the individual and inside close or related others. The authors use this insight to reinterpret data previously said to support the empathy-altruism model of helping, which asserts that empathic concern for another results in selflessness and true altruism. That is, they argue that the conditions that lead to empathic concern also lead to a greater sense of self-other overlap, raising the possibility that helping under these conditions is not selfless but is also directed toward the self. In 3 studies, the impact of empathic concern on willingness to help was eliminated when oneness--a measure of perceived self-other overlap--was considered. Path analyses revealed further that empathic concern increased helping only through its relation to perceived oneness, thereby throwing the empathy-altruism model into question. The authors suggest that empathic concern affects helping primarily as an emotional signal of oneness.

Commitments to help by children: effects on subsequent prosocial self-attributions.

Children of both sexes and at several ages were or were not induced to make a commitment to help hospitalized children by sorting papers. The commitments occurred under either public or private circumstances. Later, the children discovered that the commitment to help would require that they give up their recess times (i.e. breaks). The willingness of subjects to live up to their commitments and the altruistic self-attributions resulting from those commitments were measured. It was found that, regardless of conditions, virtually all subjects were willing to give up recess time to help. However, their self-attributions differed systemically with condition: only after making a private commitment to help did subjects come to see themselves as more altruistically oriented. Further, this effect appeared earlier for girls than for boys and persisted at least one month after the initial commitment. No such effects occurred for public commitments, suggesting that children as young as eight years were able to discount the self-relevant implications of prosocial commitments made under public scrutiny.

Consistency-based compliance: when and why do children become vulnerable?

This study examines the nature and development of behavioral consistency pressures in children. Specifically, we examined the effectiveness of the foot-in-the-door procedure in producing consistent prosocial behavior and self-attributions in kindergartners and second and fifth graders. Children were either induced to comply with a request to share prize coupons or were not given this initial prosocial experience. Those who complied either were labeled as helpful by an adult or were not. Later, children were given the opportunity to help under public or private circumstances. Moreover. children's understanding of trait stability, their internal preference for consistent behavior, and their belief that adults prefer behavioral consistency were assessed. Consistent responding began to occur within the foot-in-the-door procedure in the second grade, and this developmental shift was paralleled by a shift in children's understanding of trait stability. Furthermore, once the foot-in-the-door effect appeared among the second and fifth graders, its strength was significantly affected by the children's internal preference for consistency.

Empathy-based helping: is it selflessly or selfishly motivated?

A substantial body of evidence collected by Batson and his associates has advanced the idea that pure (i.e., selfless) altruism occurs under conditions of empathy for a needy other. An egoistic alternative account of this evidence was proposed and tested in our work. We hypothesized that an observer's heightened empathy for a sufferer brings with it increased personal sadness in the observer and that it is the egoistic desire to relieve the sadness, rather than the selfless desire to relieve the sufferer, that motivates helping. Two experiments contrasted predictions from the selfless and egoistic alternatives in the paradigm typically used by Batson and his associates. In the first, an emphatic orientation to a victim increased personal sadness, as expected. Furthermore, when sadness and empathic emotion were separated experimentally, helping was predicted by the levels of sadness subjects were experiencing but not by their empathy scores. In the second experiment, enhanced sadness was again associated with empathy for a victim. However, subjects who were led to perceive that their moods could not be altered through helping (because of the temporary action of a "mood-fixing" placebo drug) were not helpful, despite high levels of empathic emotion. The results were interpreted as providing support for an egoistically based interpretation of helping under conditions of high empathy.

Altruism as hedonism: a social development perspective on the relationship of negative mood state and helping.

A study was conducted to provide a means for reconciliation of the conflicting data on the relationship of negative mood state to altruism. Whereas some studies have shown that negative mood leads to increases in altruistic action, others have shown the reverse. It was hypothesized that the inconsistency of these results was due to differences in the ages and consequent levels of socialization of the subjects employed in the earlier studies. In order to test the hypothesis, subjects from three age groups (6-8, 10-12, and 15-18 years old) were asked to think of either depressing or neutral events and were subsequently given the opportunity to be privately generous. Consistent with predictions from the negative state relief model of altruism, the youngest, least socialized subjects were somewhat less generous in the negative mood condition, but this relationship progressively reversed itself until in the oldest, most socialized group, the negative mood subjects were significantly more generous than neutral mood controls. The data were taken as support for a hedonistic conception of altruism that views adult benevolence as self-gratification. It is suggested that the reward character of benevolence derives from the socialization experience.

Alarm pheromone in the earthworm Lumbricus terrestris.

Noxious stimulation of the earthworm Lumbricus terrestris elicits secretion of a mucus that is aversive to other members of the species, as well as to the stimulated animal when it is encountered later. This alarm pheromone is not readily soluble in water and retains its aversive properties for at least several months if not disturbed. Its influence may be responsible for some features of the data on instrumental learning in earthworms.