Do Adolescents Help and Share?

Although developmental and social psychologists have studied prosocial behaviors for the past twenty years, its occurrence in adolescents has received little attention. In the present paper, observational and self-report data were collected on 37 nonhandicapped and handicapped (behaviorally disordered) adolescents in public school settings. Helping, sharing, cooperating, comforting, defending, donating, and rescuing were the prosocial behaviors investigated. The adolescents with handicaps displayed significantly more prosocial behavior than did their nonhandicapped peers. However, the nonhandi- capped adolescents perceived themselves as engaging more frequently in pro-social behavior than did their handicapped peers.The teachers of the handicapped adolescents used a prosocial teaching style more frequently than did the teachers of nonhandicapped adolescents. Implications for future research and training are discussed