The Relationship Of Temperament, Parenting, And Adolescents’ Prosocial Behavior

Prosocial behavior refers to helping, sharing, cooperation, comforting, donations,sympathy, caring, humility, mutual aid and other acts in social life. Prosocial behavioris an important foundation for maintaining good relations between people in theprocess of interaction. Studies have shown that prosocial behavior is negativelyrelated to aggression, depression, withdrawal, peer rejection, and positively related topeer rejection(Zimmer–Gembeck, Hunter,&Pronk,2007). Understanding andrevealing the influencing factors and mechanisms of individual prosocial behavior isof positive significance to promote the development of the adolescents’ prosocialbehavior.Previous studies paid more attention to the main effect of temperament andparenting on prosocial behavior. Developmental Contextualism proposes a newresearch idea for the pattern that parenting and temperament influnce individualadjustment, that is, the interaction between parenting and temperament. In addition,there is interaction between different dimensions of temperament. However, mostliteratures were theoretical discussions, and there were rather rare ewpirical evidencesin this field.1569students from8junior high school were investigated to reveal therelationship of temperament, parenting, and adolescents’ prosocial behavior. The dataincluded prosocial scores, parenting scores and temperament scores of adolescence.Regression were conducted to analyse the prediction of parenting and temperament toadolescents’ prosocial behavior, including additive and interactive effect. The mainfindings of the study were as follows:1. These findings suggested an additive effect of temperament and parenting onadolescents’ prosocial behavior. Effortful control, surgency and affiliativeness positively predicted adolescents’ prosocial behavior. acceptance/involvement,strictness/supervision positively predicted adolescents’ prosocial behavior, andpsychological autonomy granting negatively predicted adolescents’ prosocialbehavior.2. The study also suggested an interactive effect of temperament and parentingon adolescents’ prosocial behavior. Interactive effect of surgency andstrictness/supervision on prosocial behavior conformed to protective-protective model.Interactive effect of negative affect and strictness/supervision on prosocial behaviordidn’t conform to any typical interactive model because of the complexity thatnegative affect influenced prosocial behavior. In addition, thare were differencesbetween boys and girls on interactive effect of negative affect andstrictness/supervision on adolescents’prosocial behavior.3. These findings suggested interactive effect of different dimensions oftemperament on adolescents’ prosocial behavior. Interactive effect of affiliativenessand negative affect on prosocial behavior conformed to risk-buffering model. Highlevel of affiliativeness can buffer the negative influence of negative affect onprosocial behavior.