Facilitating the prosocial development of Rohingya refugee children

Abstract

Prosociality is essential for the success of human societies. Children’s prosocial development is found to increase in contexts that foster collaboration or emotion perspective taking and is negatively affected by exposure to extreme psychosocial trauma and adversity. Based on these findings, we assessed the effect of collaboration and emotion perspective taking on three types of prosocial behavior—helping, sharing, and comforting—in Rohingya children living in a refugee settlement in India (N = 122; age range = 4–11 years). Half of the children were born in Myanmar (i.e., experienced forced migration from genocide), and half were born in the refugee settlement after their families left Myanmar. We also included a small sample of Rohingya Canadian children (N = 20; age range = 3–12 years) as a within-culture comparison of overall levels of prosocial responding, which were higher in this group relative to children in a refugee settlement. We assigned children in the refugee settlement to one of three conditions—Collaboration, Emotion Perspective Taking (intervention conditions), or Drawing (control condition)—and assessed the three types of prosocial responding following the intervention. Prosocial responding was highest after Collaboration for children born in the refugee settlement and was highest after Emotion Perspective Taking for children born in Myanmar. Overall, these findings point to the potential prosocial benefit in refugee contexts for intervention programs that are responsive to children’s lived experience.