Iwona Nowakowska

Prosociality, understood as the capacity to act in a way that benefits others, is an important feature for emerging adults to fulfill their personal needs and fulfill developmental tasks. This life period is a time of exploration within various areas of life, enabling individuals to try out and choose own worldview, lifestyle, work and preferred patterns of interpersonal relationships. This review aims at bringing together the evidence on how prosociality (prosocial orientations, values, behaviors) or deficits in such features may be linked to the fulfillment of three basic human needs as conceptualized by the self-determination theory in emerging adults. The relation of prosociality to the three tasks in the context of development in emerging adulthood: (1) reaching autonomy from the family of origin, (2) achieving own identity and (3) establishing positive relationships with others, are outlined based on a literature review. Implications for future research are also provided.

The article presents chosen 16th and 17th-century Old Polish parenetic texts about personal examples to follow for people from the courtly circle and for the women. The parenetic content of these texts are analysed in the article considering the occurrence of ideas similar to Plato’s concept of virtues (aretai) – wisdom, bravery, temperance and justice, known later in Christian tradition as cardinal virtues. Their universality makes them a good basis to describe characteristics of the majority of personal examples. In the first part of the article the author outlines the historic and literary background of creating parenetic texts in the European culture since the ancient times to the 17th century. In the second part four Old Polish texts written by: Łukasz Górnicki, Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski, Jan Kocha­nowski and Erazm Otwinowski, describing personal examples of a courtier and a woman are analysed. In each of the texts the author is looking for ideas similar to Plato’s virtue concept and presents the characteristics of ideal courtier and woman.