Emotions altruism. Mechanical altruism: Emotions of goodness

In neurophysiology and psychology, there is the concept of “prosocial behavior,” i.e. altruistic, aimed at the benefit not of the individual, but of the whole group. It makes people easy to share with others, help and protect - as opposed to the much more familiar antisocial behavior, which focuses on maximizing personal benefit or gain.

According to one theory, the difference between people who actively practice pro- and antisocial behavior is that altruists have a greater mental ability to suppress their selfish urges. In this case, everything should happen in the prefrontal cortex, where the most complex issues related to socially conditioned behavior, decision making, etc. are resolved.

However, perhaps this mechanism is much more “automated” and emotional. At least, this conclusion can be reached by looking at the results obtained by Japanese and British researchers led by Masahiko Haruno.

Scientists have noticed that some people have a much more pronounced sense of social injustice and inequality than others. To study this point further, they recruited 2 groups of volunteers - 25 altruists who often and actively demonstrated prosocial behavior, and 14 egoists who simply did not care about others (the selection was carried out on the basis of standard behavioral tests).

Participants were given the task of dividing money with another (hypothetical) person - and the researchers closely monitored their brain activity while solving the problem using MRI. As expected, the altruists tried to divide the finances equally, while the egoists kept most of it for themselves. Another result was much less expected.

It turned out that the only difference in the pattern of brain activity that occurs during “sharing” between egoists and altruists is found in one single region of the brain - the amygdala. With an unequal distribution of money, the activity of altruists increased noticeably, while no changes were noticed among egoists. “The more dissatisfied people are, the more activity appears in the amygdala,” one of the authors of the work commented on the result. Apparently, the amygdala responds to situations automatically, bypassing rational judgment."

Recall that the amygdalae in the brain 2 are two small glands located deep in the temporal lobes. They play a key role in the formation of both positive and negative emotions (including the experience of fear - read more about this: “The Scariest Place”). If we add to the activity of the amygdala observed by Masahiko Haruno’s group the complete absence of any difference in the activity of the prefrontal cortex, then the conclusion is obvious: the suppression of selfish impulses in altruists has absolutely nothing to do with it. The point is in emotions.

To verify the results obtained, the scientists repeated the experiment, slightly complicating it. This time, in parallel with the division problem, they were given a simple memory task. By doing so, they “distracted” the prefrontal cortex and other areas of the brain to solve a different problem - but the amygdala responded in exactly the same way. Scientists received confirmation of their initial findings.

According to their Belgian colleague Carolyn Declerck, these results are fully consistent with her own, not yet published. Independently of Haruno's group, in other ways, she also came to the conclusion that prosocial behavior is driven primarily by “automatic” responses.

Now scientists have to figure out where the difference comes from, leading to pro- and antisocial behavior in the amygdala. Most likely, it is caused by the environment of early childhood, when the brain is in its most active phases of growth and development. Perhaps in the future, based on these data, teachers will get down to business and create methods for forming members of a society that is much more humane than our current kingdom of egocentrism.

This article is about Effective Altruism. It turns out that even in such a confusing and emotional matter as helping others, you can make completely rational decisions.

What is altruism?

Why do you need to use your head and think rationally? This is the only way to be sure that your good deed has brought maximum benefit. Or even brought at least some.

There are many potential candidates for your help. Here are just some of the possible alternatives - in no particular order:

Foundation for helping people with cancer
NGO organizing nutrition centers in Africa
Beggar in transition
Foundation for the distribution of anti-malaria nets in third world countries
Fundraising for surgery (on social networks, the author of the ad is unknown to you)
Coffee farmers in third world countries (through higher markups on fair trade coffee)

You decide to donate $100. Where would you send them?

Let's say you've made a choice.

Next question: how would you then track the effectiveness of the donation? That is, did it ultimately bring some benefit?

This question is important because in each of the above cases, these $100 will have a completely different fate. According to research, somewhere this money will not bring any benefit at all. Somewhere similar benefits could have been generated tens of times cheaper.

There is also a clear leader on this list - every dollar of donations there will bring tens of times more benefits than to all other options combined.

There is a chance that you did not guess the name of this fund, relying on your intuition. And it’s not a fact that they identified the most useless alternative.

However, when it comes to helping others, people often listen to their hearts - both in everyday situations and in cases where they fundamentally decide to donate part of their income to charity. The alternative approach of Effective Altruism suggests thinking with your head and basing your donations on real numbers.

Effective Altruism provides a set of principles that help you rationally choose the best alternative from the endless list of all those vying for your charitable money - and also allows you to be confident that your money will actually do good.

Effective altruism

The idea of effective altruism is simple: there are many ways to help others, but these ways are not equal. They all differ in their usefulness.

For $48,000 in the USA you can buy a guide dog for one blind person, or with the same money you can perform operations to treat trichiasis on 1200 people, and restore vision to each of them with an 80% probability. The difference is huge, and yet people who truly want to help others donate money to Guide Dogs of America rather than Helen Keller International.

And unfortunately, our resources are limited. This means that even if we consider a hundred ways to help others, and even if we have a lot of enthusiasm for this topic, we are still forced to choose.

How to choose when there are so many problems in the world?

The concept of effective altruism offers a different approach: ignore feelings - think with your head.

Emotions only distract and prevent you from soberly weighing alternatives. A blind man's story on the local news can move us so much that we immediately donate $50 to him to buy a guide dog, paying about 0.1% of its cost. And with the same money we could save someone from blindness. Agree that these are events of slightly unequal importance. But we don’t know this person with trachiasis, and in general he sits somewhere far away in Bangladesh, so he doesn’t make it into the news.

How to measure the impact of donations

It is better to decide who exactly to help without emotions, but with the help of mathematics and based on scientific research. We can reduce all possible alternatives to one unit of measurement, and it is called QALY.

QALY stands for “Quality-Adjusted Life Year”, or “quality-adjusted year of life”.

1 QALY is a year of life lived in ideal health. Ideal - that is, such that there is no reason to complain to the doctor at all.

It is considered this way: if you save a person from death, and he lives another 5 years of life in perfect health, then you have done exactly 5 QALYs of good.

If the person you saved lives all these five years with minor illnesses (80% of ideal health), then his gain is slightly less. It takes 5 years to multiply by 80% - you get 4 QALYs.

And if you extended a person’s life by 5 years, but his health is in poor condition (conditional 20% of the ideal), then you gave him 1 QALY. Which is also not bad, and better than nothing.

Effective altruism suggests comparing all possible alternatives to helping others using QALYs. For example, you could rank different charities by how many QALYs they generate per $1,000 donation.

Let's say charity A transforms this $1000 into 1 QALY.

But fund B turns $1000 into only 0.1 QALY.

Therefore, the first fund is 10 times more effective than the second.

In other words, QALY is a kind of currency into which you can exchange your money. Each purchase of a unit of this currency extends someone’s life by one year, and you can purchase it at a different rate - depending on which charity you are “buying” it from.

How can you calculate the effectiveness of various charitable programs? This can be done based on historical data. Researchers collect data on how much money was spent on different programs, how exactly that money was spent, and what results those funds achieved.

Of course, I am greatly simplifying the logic of the calculations, but the general idea is this.

It is thanks to such studies that we can predict the approximate effect of our donations. And this is important: By giving money somewhere blindly, without relying on research, you are likely to burn it. How do you know how that beggar from the station will spend his money? And what will the funds sent through the heartbreaking VKontakte ad really be used for? And even if they go to buy drugs for a person with cancer, you don't know how it will affect his life expectancy and health. And there is a high chance that the effect will be negligible. This means that your donation was ineffective - but could really help someone.

Therefore, adherents of effective altruism, having decided to allocate a certain% of their income to help other people, as a rule, choose the most proven methods. And these methods mainly include several large charitable foundations, whose effectiveness has been confirmed in research.

Despite the conventionality of QALY, without such studies and calculations we remain blind. All charities look equally effective to us, and the ones that attract the most money are those that evoke the greatest emotional response in us.

What are the consequences of irrational donations?

In the early 2000s there was a huge hype around PlayPump carousels. This is a kind of pump that allows you to pump water out of the ground, and all you need to do is ride on carousels that are attached to the pumping system.

However, in practice the idea turned out to be not so wonderful.

The children did not like the attraction because the PlayPumps did not spin long enough and freely, like regular carousels - they had to constantly apply effort due to the resistance of the pumping system. The enthusiasm of local children disappeared quite quickly, and old women were forced to spin PlayPump, which was extremely difficult for them. Or the carousels were pushed by the children themselves - for this they were paid to skip school.

One PlayPump cost an average of $14,000, while a regular pump, which is more efficient and easy to use, cost $3,000. At the same time, PlayPump coped poorly even with the task of extracting water - in order to meet the village’s daily needs for water, you need to turn the carousel 27 hours a day.

Such failures in charity happen all the time, and at first glance everything always seems wonderful.

Another example is fundraising events popular in the West that combine charity with skydiving. This often raises money for various medical charities, but here's the problem: on average, for every £1 raised, the UK National Health Service has to spend £13 to treat these same skydivers for injuries acquired as a result of their jumps.

And the last case - on television in the USA there is a popular program “Scared Straight!”, which has been produced since 1978. Its essence is that young teenagers who have broken the law are taken on an excursion to a real prison - and there they are frightened in every possible way by the prisoners. So, according to the plan, they should be discouraged from any desire to get involved in illegal affairs.

Well, research has shown that in fact the opposite happens. Participation in the program makes children more likely to commit crimes and end up in prison. Moreover, according to WSIPP calculations, every dollar spent on the Scared Straight! program generates a loss of $203.51 for the community as a whole. Although intuitively it seems to us that such a show is only for the benefit of everyone.

Of course, there are few such cases of “harmful” charity. A significant portion of charitable organizations produce zero or extremely weak effects. In essence, people are not doing the world any good by giving them money. And intuition rather gets in the way in such decisions. Therefore, it is important to rely on real facts, accumulated statistics and research.

What else to consider when making donation decisions

QALYs are just one way to compare the effectiveness of programs.

There are other conventional units of measurement - for example, WALY(Wellbeing-Adjusted Life Year), which takes into account not only a person’s health, but also his overall well-being, including psychological.

In the case of WALY, unfortunately, there is not yet a uniform calculation method. Assessing psychological state using quantitative methods is much more difficult than health. Still, one possible way is through various questionnaires, for example Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale. It takes into account subjective levels of happiness and life satisfaction, as well as overall psychological functioning, relationships with other people and feelings of self-actualization.

Quite an impact on a child's life for one donation equivalent to 1/3 the cost of a Starbucks latte.

QALY And WALY- this is not the only thing that can be taken into account when making rational decisions about donations. It also makes sense to take into account how popular donations to solve a particular problem are in general.

Vertical axis - WALYs per $1,000 - how many years, adjusted for subjective quality of life, will the average spent thousand dollars bring; horizontal axis - Degree of neglect - this is the extent to which a given problem is ignored, to solve which the donation is sent

Let's put it this way - you will bring the greatest effect if the problem you choose is ignored by others, and at the same time, donations there bring a high return. To do this, you can look at reports on how much money is donated to certain funds, and how much money they are still able to “digest” with the same usefulness per dollar as before. But as a rule, even such large and super-effective foundations as the Against Malaria Foundation are able to accommodate many more donations, while continuing to successfully save human lives. Oddly enough, compared to many other, more popular foundations, AMF is greatly underpaid - and is not even included in the top 100 largest charitable foundations in the world.

Where to donate

If you are fundamentally ready to spend part of your income on charity, or suddenly caught yourself on a one-time impulse “let me transfer 5,000 rubles to an animal shelter,” do not follow your emotions. This is not a good moral compass. The simplest and most effective solution: open the website https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/Top-Charities or http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities, and select any fund from the top of the rating. Most likely, the effect of investing in one of these funds will be thousands of times higher.

The ratings are updated at least once a year, and they also take into account how much the funds are able to “digest” the money coming into them - roughly speaking, if there are too many donations, then new funds will take the first positions.

An even simpler solution is to go with the Against Malaria Foundation. Every $2.5 donated goes towards the purchase of one anti-malaria net - and it can protect people from malaria for four years.

$2.5 is only 150 rubles, which is what they throw at musicians in the passages. But for some family in Africa, this net will play a significant role, because malaria is an extremely unpleasant disease, and there is also a considerable risk of death from it, especially for young children.

As you can see, we are talking about relatively small amounts. They can have a significant impact because they will be aimed at helping people in countries characterized by extreme poverty. Just think about what's happening on this graph:

Of course, the most reliable data on effectiveness has been accumulated by funds that are involved in various medical programs. Their effect is easier to track - and there are many researchers doing this.

But there are other ways to bring significant benefits. For example, invest in funds aimed at combating existential risks. In other words, they are working to prevent us from destroying ourselves. This is important - after all, some virus or climate collapse can cancel out all other efforts, and reducing their likelihood even by a small percentage is of great importance.

For example, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is a good option. This organization uses the funds transferred by him for research in the field of friendly artificial intelligence (AI is considered one of the most serious threats to us in the near future).

Is it worth going to work in the charitable sector? Maybe this is the best way to help humanity?

Unfortunately or fortunately, no. One of the most counter-intuitive ideas about effective altruism is that it is better to go to work for JPMorgan or McKinsey. There is a lot of money to be made at investment banks and top consulting firms. You can live well on this money, and painlessly allocate part of your income to highly effective charitable foundations. Therefore, you shouldn’t give up everything and move to volunteer in Africa - this will give you very little benefit.

Suppose you earn good money in some corporation, and are imbued with the idea of effective altruism. You love that you can truly help people for relatively little money, and be confident that your donations will actually save someone's life or restore their health.

Where to begin

To begin with, it makes sense to study in more detail the concept of effective altruism. If you are comfortable reading in English, then it will be useful to read this book:

Next, you need to actually decide how much money to allocate to charity, and whether it’s worth it at all. This directly depends on the stability of your financial situation, and a fundamental decision on the topic of altruism.

Selecting funds to donate to is based on research data. The biggest risk here is to be influenced by personal preferences and allow them to push you towards ineffective choices. Someone whose uncle died of cancer may have particularly strong feelings about the topic of cancer - and donate money to the treatment of cancer patients.

But emotions alone will not make this choice the right one.

Quite the opposite.

Becoming an effective altruist does not mean transforming into a rational villain who won’t give a homeless person change for coffee or give his aunt a ride to Domodedovo.

It is not necessary to give up small, pleasant, albeit perhaps ineffective attempts to help others.

But pleasant is not equally effective, and the main thing is to realize this.

If you have fundamentally decided for yourself that you want to bring real benefit to others in much greater quantities than now, without any reward in return, then it is better to find the best tool for this. And the method of effective altruism is the best we have now. Only with its help can you be at least somehow confident that you are saving the lives of real people around the world, spending relatively little money on it.

Of course, the effective altruism approach in its current form is not without its shortcomings.

That is, you do not receive guarantees that the specific $100 you donated extended someone’s life by six months. No. You just get the highest possible probability of such a scenario. But still not 100%.

Moreover, these metrics are flawed because they do not take into account the different weights of different human lives. Not in the sense that one person is more important than another. Rather, it is that different people generate WALY for others in different ways - for example, the death of a major philanthropic entrepreneur can be a huge tragedy, because... he will no longer earn millions of dollars and transfer them to the accounts of charitable foundations.

And there are a lot of other factors for which it would be worth adjusting all these metrics, and perhaps this will happen over time. But here you shouldn’t fall into the typical trap of intuition - “since it doesn’t work perfectly, then it shouldn’t be used.”

You can use it - albeit with partial losses. After all, a barrel with holes is better than a barrel without a bottom.

Altruism: from emotions to rationality

This article is about Effective Altruism. It turns out that even in such a confusing and emotional matter as helping others, you can make completely rational decisions.

What is altruism?

This is behavior in which we partially sacrifice our own good, and thereby help others.

Why do you need to use your head and think rationally? This is the only way to be sure that your good deed has brought maximum benefit. Or even brought at least some.

There are many potential candidates for your help. Here are just some of the possible alternatives - in no particular order:

Foundation for helping people with cancer
NGO organizing nutrition centers in Africa
Beggar in transition
Foundation for the distribution of anti-malaria nets in third world countries
Fundraising for surgery (on social networks, the author of the ad is unknown to you)
Coffee farmers in third world countries (through higher markups on fair trade coffee)

You decide to donate $100. Where would you send them?

Let's say you've made a choice.

Next question: how would you then track the effectiveness of the donation? That is, did it ultimately bring some benefit?

There is also a clear leader on this list - every dollar of donations there will bring tens of times more benefits than to all other options combined.

There is a chance that you did not guess the name of this fund, relying on your intuition. And it’s not a fact that they identified the most useless alternative.

Effective altruism

The idea of effective altruism is simple: there are many ways to help others, but these ways are not equal. They all differ in their usefulness.

And unfortunately, our resources are limited. This means that even if we consider a hundred ways to help others, and even if we have a lot of enthusiasm for this topic, we are still forced to choose.

How to choose when there are so many problems in the world?

Here we usually get lost, close our eyes to everything, and crawl out of our shell only in those cases when something completely heartbreaking happens nearby.

The concept of effective altruism offers a different approach: ignore feelings - think with your head.

Emotions only distract and prevent you from soberly weighing alternatives. A blind man's story on the local news can move us so much that we immediately donate $50 to him to buy a guide dog, paying about 0.1% of its cost. Could someone use the same money? save from blindness. Agree that these are events of slightly unequal importance. But we don’t know this person with trachiasis, and in general he sits somewhere far away in Bangladesh, so he doesn’t make it into the news.

How to measure the impact of donations

QALY stands for “Quality-Adjusted Life Year”, or “quality-adjusted year of life”.

1 QALY is a year of life lived in ideal health. Ideal - that is, such that there is no reason to complain to the doctor at all.

It is considered this way: if you save a person from death, and he lives another 5 years of life in perfect health, then you have done exactly 5 QALYs of good.

If the person you saved lives all these five years with minor illnesses (80% of ideal health), then his gain is slightly less. It takes 5 years to multiply by 80% - you get 4 QALYs.

And if you extended a person’s life by 5 years, but his health is in poor condition (conditional 20% of the ideal), then you gave him 1 QALY. Which is also not bad, and better than nothing.

Effective altruism suggests comparing all possible alternatives to helping others using QALYs. For example, you could rank different charities by how many QALYs they generate per $1,000 donation.

Let's say Charity A transforms this $1000 into 1 QALY.

But fund B turns $1000 into only 0.1 QALY.

Therefore, the first fund is 10 times more effective than the second.

Of course, I am greatly simplifying the logic of the calculations, but the general idea is this.

It is thanks to such studies that we can predict the approximate effect of our donations. And this is important: by giving money somewhere blindly, without relying on research, you are likely to burn it. How do you know how that beggar from the station will spend his money? And what will the funds sent through the heartbreaking VKontakte ad really be used for? And even if they go to buy drugs for a person with cancer, you don't know how it will affect his life expectancy and health. And there is a high chance that the effect will be negligible. This means that your donation was ineffective - but could really help someone.

This is a tough approach, and for many it is psychologically difficult - but it is honest. Even Bill Gates, who spends tens of billions of dollars on charity, is not able to help everyone - and you, most likely, are not Bill Gates.

What are the consequences of irrational donations?

It sounds great: children play on these carousels, and residents of nearby villages receive scarce water. At the same time, there was a billboard with advertising on the water tank, which made the entire system self-sustaining. So PlayPumps were installed en masse across southern Africa, sponsored by companies like Ford and Colgate, publicly supported by Jay Z and Beyoncé, and donors at the 2006 Clinton Foundation ceremony raising a total of $16.4 million in support of PlayPump.

However, in practice the idea turned out to be not so wonderful.

Such failures in charity happen all the time, and at first glance everything always seems wonderful.

Well, research has shown that in fact the opposite happens. Participation in the program increases children are more likely to commit crimes and end up in prison. Moreover, according to WSIPP calculations, every dollar spent on the Scared Straight! program generates a loss of $203.51 for the community as a whole. Although intuitively it seems to us that such a show is only for the benefit of everyone.

What else to consider when making donation decisions

QALYs are just one way to compare the effectiveness of programs.

There are other conventional units of measurement - for example, WALY (Wellbeing-Adjusted Life Year), which takes into account not only a person’s health, but also his general well-being, including psychological.

Quite an impact on a child's life for one donation equivalent to 1/3 the cost of a Starbucks latte.

QALYs and WALYs are not the only things that can be taken into account when making rational donation decisions. It also makes sense to take into account how popular donations to solve a particular problem are in general.

Where to donate

An even simpler solution is to go with the Against Malaria Foundation. Every $2.5 donated goes towards the purchase of one anti-malaria net - and it can protect people from malaria for four years.

You can even balance your “investment portfolio” by giving a little bit each month to different funds. Here

Limonchenko Roman Andreevich, 3rd year student (direction of training “Psychology and pedagogy of deviant behavior”, specialization “Psychological and pedagogical support for children and adolescents at risk”) of the Faculty of Psychology of the Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Higher Professional Education “Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University”, Novosibirsk [email protected]

Scientific supervisor – Olga Alfonsasovna Belobrykina, Candidate of Psychological Sciences, Professor of the Department of General Psychology and History of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University. Novosibirsk, academician of the Academy of Polar Medicine and Extreme Human Ecology

[email protected]

The relationship between altruism and alexithymia in the structure of social emotions in adolescents with deviant behavior: a theoretical excursion into the research problem

Abstract. The article presents the results of a theoretical analysis of the problem of social emotions, and examines a model of traits of cultural similarities and differences in the perception or assessment of social emotions. The characteristics of altruism and alexithymia as alternative poles in the structure of social emotions are presented. The role of social emotions in the formation of adolescent behavior is characterized, and the probabilistic influence of alexithymic tendencies on the emergence of a tendency to behavioral disorders in adolescence is shown. Key words: social emotions, altruism, alexithymia, adolescence, deviant behavior.

The problem of emotional development of the individual has been given priority in scientific research in recent years. In the categorical apparatus of modern Russian psychology, the concept of “emotion” is considered as “a mental reflection in the form of a direct biased experience of the life meaning of phenomena and situations.” Emotions are the fundamental basis of the psyche. In the process of human ontogenesis, emotions, as special functional systems, are cultivated. According to L.S. Vygotsky, “culture creates special forms of behavior, it modifies the activity of mental functions, it builds new floors in the developing system of human behavior.” Considering the significance of higher mental functions in human development, he noted their initial sociocultural determination, emphasizing that “higher mental functions are interiorized relations of a social order.” He formulated the concept of “experience,” defined as the basic unit of the social situation of a child’s development. Analyzing the nature and content of individual social emotions (embarrassment, shame, etc.), L.S. Vygotsky denotes their key role in cultural formation, organization of behavior and life activity subject as a whole. How effectively a person will interact with people around him, build relationships with them and achieve self-realization depends, among other things, on the development of social emotions, the mediators of which are moral norms of relationships, rules and behavior patterns. In this regard, the study of the characteristics of the manifestation of social emotions in adolescents with behavioral disorders is currently relevant. By social emotions we will understand the system of a person’s experiences of his relationship to other people, the structure of which includes a wide range of emotions and feelings that arise from the moment of the birth of a child , mastered by him in relationships with others and implemented throughout life in social interaction and interpersonal communication with other people. A significant proportion of social emotions are acquired forms of their expression and implementation, and those individual emotional reactions that were innate become arbitrary in form and social in content in the process of human life.

The list of social emotions includes a significant list of emotions (offense, embarrassment, shame, shyness, empathy, despair, envy, jealousy, etc.) and feelings (guilt, pride, duty, honor, dignity, justice, solidarity, responsibility, gratitude, etc. ) a number of which have been sufficiently studied in domestic and foreign science. At the same time, as D. Matsumoto notes, there is an urgent need to expand the boundaries of judgments about emotions. He believes that in addition to assessing the cross-cultural intensity of the expression of social emotions, examining similarities and differences in their recognition, it is necessary to assess the intentions associated with behavior in order to highlight the social or personal significance of the expression of social emotions in the communication process. The scientist proposes a model of traits of cultural similarities and differences in the perception or assessment of social emotions. Within the framework of this model, it is assumed that the assessment of emotions is carried out under the influence of a facial recognition program (which is universal and innate in nature) and culturally specific decoding norms that weaken or mask in a certain way the perception of social emotions. Perceiving the emotions of other people as a stimulus, the subject, before making a final judgment, superimposes on the stimulus the norms he has learned during the learning process regarding the perception of the expression of emotions of this kind in others, and these norms may vary depending on stable sociocultural parameters (individualism-collectivism, differentiation depending on from social status). Note that in the general structure of social emotions, scientists assign a special place to altruism. Thus, D. Myers understands altruism as compassion for a stranger, willingness to help without expecting gratitude. Altruism, he notes, is diametrically opposed to egoism, since all the actions of selfish people are explained by personal interests. A possible explanation for the phenomenon of altruism is contained in the theory of social exchange, which designates the interaction of people as a “social economy”, based on the fact that people exchange not only material values and money, but also such social values as love, information and status. When experiencing compassion, a person does not think so much about himself as about the one who is suffering, that is, he experiences a feeling of empathy, primarily in relation to close people or those with whom he identifies himself. Altruism can manifest itself within the framework of the norm of social responsibility, according to which those in need of help should be helped without expectation of compensation in the future (for example, helping the disabled, children, those who are perceived by us as unable to participate in equal exchange). According to K.E. Izard, altruism as an essential component of social responsibility is mediated by positive emotional experiences that do not change over time, which become the main driving force of the highest form of behavior (ethical or moral). Small rewards and good luck induce positive emotions in people, which promote altruism. E.P. Ilyin emphasizes that when they talk about altruism, we are talking about promoting not a common interest, but the interest of another person, therefore altruism differs from collectivism, a principle that orients a person for the benefit of a community or group. Summarizing the results of a number of studies, the scientist identifies the following characteristics altruistic behavior: 1) voluntary and conscious actions as manifestations of the properties of the will, and not the result of external coercion; 2) disinterested exclusion of expectation of reciprocal benefit; 3) the desire to promote the good of other people for humanitarian reasons; 4) the presence of an emotional attitude towards people, sympathy for them, goodwill, sympathy, willingness to help; 5) social orientation of the action; 6) self-denial (selflessness).

The emotional basis of altruism is the tendency to empathy, sympathy and understanding of other people. An altruistic personality is characterized by a developed sense of duty, rationality, conscientiousness, gullibility, and the desire for stability in relationships with people. It is believed that the conscious form of altruism begins to manifest itself in adolescence. At the same time, it is in adolescence that the manifestation of behavioral disorders is observed, considered as a form of protest against total socialization , a teenager's defensive reaction to an unfavorable social developmental situation. Therefore, the underdevelopment of social emotions is considered as a marker of deviant behavior. E.V. Zmanovskaya, considering deviant behavior as a multifactorial phenomenon, determines the level determinants of its occurrence: a) the individual personal level, at which the factors of deviance are maladaptive personality traits - violations of normative legal consciousness, ineffective self-regulation, emotional disturbances, alienation from the cultural environment, etc.; b) behavioral level, where the factors of deviance are a persistent behavioral stereotype with long-term persistence of deviation, a positive personal attitude towards deviation, vivid (peak) experiences at the time of deviation, denial of the negative consequences of deviation. D. Myers considers the causes of behavioral disorders in adolescence to be prejudices (for example, prejudices towards adults or towards representatives of subcultures to which the teenager is not a member) that have deep emotional roots. For example, frustration supports hostility, which manifests itself in seeking unjustified blame for one's own mistakes, as well as in obvious, direct hostility towards competitors. Prejudices based on a sense of social superiority help, in the author’s opinion, to hide a person’s lack of confidence in his own abilities. One of the defects in the emotional development of the individual is alexithymia, the cause of which is most often violations in the system of microsocial relationships, primarily in the “child-parent” dyad. . Exploring alexithymia within the framework of a psychoanalytic concept, G. Crystal defines it as an affective disorder that impairs a person’s ability to verbalize emotions and empathic interaction. According to a number of authors, in “alexithymics” emotions are often not differentiated: they are vague and nonspecific, expressed more in distress reactions, than in full emotions. They are not capable of understanding and distinguishing their sensory states, of comprehending their reactions to events in life. Typical for them are: the inability to reflective self-awareness, which enables a person to determine the “feeling” he experiences as an adequate response to his self-esteem; poor communication; affective passivity of speech, decreased imagination function. From the point of view of V.V. Nikolaeva, alexithymia is directly related to the characteristics of psychological self-regulation. The psychological component of self-regulation manifests itself, in her opinion, at the following levels:  activation level, which helps maintain optimal mental activity necessary for human activity;  operational-technical level, ensuring conscious organization and correction of the subject’s actions;  personal motivational level a level that ensures awareness of the motives of one’s own activities, self-management of the motivational-need sphere. It is the last level of self-regulation that provides a person with the opportunity for self-actualization, characterized by motives for maintaining internal harmony and self-identity. Based on this, the author suggests that the instability or narrowness of the motivational hierarchy, the unformed need for self-regulation, and means of reflection that have not been assimilated in ontogenesis constitute the prerequisites for the emergence of alexithymia, as a result of which the dominance of actual human needs and unrealized emotions increases. In accordance with the position of V.V. Nikolaeva, one can assume that in adolescence, a pronounced tendency towards alexithymic manifestations will be observed to a greater extent in adolescents with an insufficiently developed level of self-regulation. This is evidenced by the results of individual studies showing that the insufficient formation of the regulatory function in adolescence leads to the entropy of emotional experiences, a decrease in the demand for social emotions and, as a result, to the consolidation of behavioral disorders. Theoretical analysis allows us to formulate a number of conclusions: 1) the perception of social emotions depends on the norms of their perception by others learned during the learning process; 2) the emotional basis of altruism is empathy; 3) altruism is aimed specifically at another person, and not at a collective or group; 4) emotional disorders and alienation from the cultural environment are factors in the occurrence of behavioral disorders; 5) the psychological cause of the occurrence of alexithymic tendencies is the lack of formation of psychological self-regulation, which leads to the fixation of a negative emotional state of the individual; 6) from a psychological point of view, alexithymia can be defined as a violation in the development and expression of social emotions.

The results of the theoretical analysis allow us to make assumptions that: 1) altruism and alexethymia in the structure of social emotions represent alternative poles; 2) the severity of the alexethymic pole is a probabilistic indicator of the tendency to behavioral disorders; 3) in adolescents with deviant behavior, the degree of mastery of social emotions is qualitatively lower compared to peers characterized by a prosocial behavioral orientation.

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Altruistic is understood as behavior aimed at the benefit of others and not calculated for any external reward. In many ways, altruism will exist due to the presence of empathy in people, which is why it can be considered as one of the types of emotionally determined behavior.

A.F. Lazursky (1922) said that altruism is based on a complex of human emotional qualities: a feeling of sympathy or the process of “feeling”, affective excitability, strength and duration of emotions, as well as a significant development of volitional activity aimed at helping those suffering and in need, lack of egoism and selfishness, often reaching the point of self-forgetfulness and self-sacrifice, significant development of moral qualities, interest in internal, spiritual experiences.

Given the dependence on the orientation of the individual, altruism can take various forms. As A.F. Lazursky writes, “significantly developed volitional activity, aimed primarily at combating cruel and selfish oppression

ly, makes a person an unyielding, fierce fighter for truth and love of humanity... or deep faith in the benefits of enlightenment and in the possibility of ideological and moral regeneration of humanity forces an active altruist to direct all his strength to the education of the younger generation (Pestalozzi), or we have a deeply religious a man, a typical contemplative, whose ardent love for people, penetrating all his religious views, forces him not to retire to the desert, but to devote his entire life to the work of preaching and saving lost humanity (Francis of Assisi); or, conversely, a person of a completely different scale, a typical industrialist, cautiously calculating and practical, devotes all his wealth and all his energy to the poor working people and creates new forms of organization for the working class (Robert Owen)" (Psychology of Personality, 1982, p. .262-263)

It has been revealed that the manifestation of altruism is associated with the motives of moral duty and moral sympathy (Staub, 1974). In the first case, altruistic actions are performed for the sake of moral satisfaction, treating the object of help in different ways, even negatively. Here, help is sacrificial in nature (“tears away from oneself”) In the second case, altruism will remain in connection with identification-empathic fusion, identification, empathy, but sometimes does not end in action. Here the help does not have the character of sacrifice.

Teaching children altruistic behavior. J. Aronfreed and V. Pascal (Aronfreed, Pascal, 1970) used empathic interaction between a child and an adult as a way of teaching the former altruistic behavior. They based their method on the idea that in order to enhance altruistic behavior, it is extremely important to visually perceive or realize the emotional value of the consequences of their actions. Empathy as the ability to experience the emotions of another person ensures the strengthening of such behavior. In the experiment, the child was asked to choose between an action for himself (press a button and get candy) and an action for another (light red and thereby cause a smile - the approval of the experimenter). The choice of action for another is associated in the child’s mind with the pleasure of the experimenter. The latter’s smile and touch are symbols of his emotional state, evoking similar emotions in the child. These emotions stimulate the child to altruistic behavior.

The same principle was used by these authors for negative experiences of an adult. First, an adult wearing headphones shows with his facial expressions how unpleasant the sensation of tinnitus is to him. Then he teaches the child to turn off the noise, and then the child himself turns off the noise if he sees that one of the children participating in the experiment is unpleasant.

B. Moore et al. (Moor et al., 1973) showed that children in whom positive emotions were evoked (they were asked to remember the most pleasant event in their lives) showed significantly greater altruism, and children in whom negative emotions were aroused - less altruism than children in the control group.

M. Barnett and J. Briand (Barnett, Brian, 1974) found that in seven-year-old children, losing in a competition did not affect their expression of altruism (the selfless desire to help another), while in ten-year-olds, the experience of loss suppresses altruism.