Challenges
There have been challenges on the negative state relief model since 1980’s. Daniel Batson (1989) and his associates found out that regardless of anticipated mood enhancement, high-empathy subjects helped more than low-empathy subjects. In other words, high-empathy subjects would still helped more either under easy escape conditions or even when they could probably get good mood to relieve from negative state without helping. Therefore, they concluded that, obviously, something other than relieving negative state was motivating the helping behavior of the high-empathy subjects in their studies. It contradicted with the theory proposed by Robert Cialdini (1987) which supported that empathy-altruism hypothesis was actually the product of an entirely egoistic desire for personal mood management.
Many researchers have challenged the generalizability of the model. It was found that effect of negative state relief on helping behavior varied with ages (Cialdini & Kenrick, 1976). For very young children, a negative mood would not increase their helpfulness because they had not yet learned to associate prosocial behavior with social rewards. Grade-school children who had been socialized to an awareness of the helping norm (but had not fully internalized it) would help more in response to negative affect only when someone gave them reinforcements or rewards (Kenrick et al., 1979). For adults, however, helpfulness has become self-reinforcing; therefore, a negative mood reliably increased helping. However, according to the study conducted by Kenrick (1979), negative emotions in children promoted their helping behaviors if direct rewards were possibly provided for their prosocial behaviors.
Negative affect was treated as a generalized state in negative state relief model (Carlson & Miller, 1987). Specific types of negative feelings that increase helping - guilt, embarrassment, or awareness of cognitive inconsistency (Apsler, 1975; Carlsmith & Gross, 1969; Kidd & Berkowitz, 1976), were not viewed as uniquely important. They just fell within the general category of negative mood (Cialdini et al., 1976). According to the model, not all negative feeling states boost helping. For instance, anger and frustration, naturally elicited responses contradictory to helping, would not increase helping (Cialdini, Baumann, & Kenrick, 1981).
Read more about this topic: Negative-state Relief Model
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