Kindness is Contagious Playlist
This fall, UCLA’s Center for Scholars & Storytellers (CSS) and Bedari Kindness Institute (BKI) are excited to collaborate alongside Actress Tabitha Brown to create a Kindness Playlist for YouTube Kids. The playlist, “Kindness is Contagious”, will be featured on the YouTube Kids App during the month of October. This initiative aims to support the creation of developmentally appropriate content that promotes kindness in an authentic and engaging way. In addition to viewing the playlist, we encourage adults to continue to promote kindness for children using the Caring Adult Resource Guide that we have provided.
Featured Videos
With support from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, & Television and input from the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Making Caring Common, CSS and the BKI created videos for kids, by kids, about all of the different ways to spread kindness, as well as curated existing content from YouTube about kindness for children to enjoy. These selfie videos feature children from all over the world sharing impactful acts of kindness that they’ve done or seen others do.
Caring Adult Resource Guide
We created the Caring Adult Resource Guide to provide activities you can do with your child to keep your child engaged in learning about kindness. These activities will help your child practice cultivating kindness and joy while thinking of positive actions they can take to promote kindness among others. We also have printable activity cards that complement the resource guide.
Why and How This Came Together
Kindness media content for children often center around the messaging that you must be kind. However, research has shown that this messaging isn’t always effective at actually promoting kindness. To be sure our playlist actually encourages kindness, we partnered up with the kindness experts at the BKI. Inspired by Dr. Fessler’s research, we created content centered on the idea that kindness is contagious - experiencing kindness makes people feel good and encourages them to be kind to others. We hope that our videos of children sharing kind acts will inspire viewers to spread kindness in their everyday lives.
Key Partners:
Other Resources
Elevation Leads to Altruistic Behavior, Above and Beyond General Positive Affect - Schnall, Roper & Fessler (2010)
Elevation, an emotion for prosocial contagion, is experienced more strongly by those with greater expectations of the cooperativeness of others - Sparks, Fessler & Holbrook (2019)