Children's Neural Processing of the Misfortunes and Fortunes of Prosocial and Antisocial Individuals

Behavioral studies have found that children are less likely to share the feelings of antisocial individuals than those of prosocial individuals. However, the underlying neural mechanism remains unclear. To address this gap, the current study utilized electroencephalogram (EEG) to examine the neural responses of 4- to 12-year-old children to the misfortunes and fortunes of prosocial and antisocial individuals (N = 73). When observing the experiences of prosocial individuals, children exhibited a greater amplitude of parietal P3, an indicator of top-down allocated attention, to misfortunes compared to fortunes. This difference disappeared when observing the experiences of antisocial individuals. Additionally, children displayed stronger mu suppression, indicating neural mirroring, toward prosocial individuals than antisocial individuals while observing their experiences. The current findings suggest that children allocate more attention resources to the experiences, especially misfortunes, of prosocial individuals than antisocial individuals. These findings deepened our understanding of how children react to others’ experiences based on others’ moral behaviors from a neural perspective.