Determinants of adolescent prosocial behavior: Parental personality and socialization

The purpose of the current study was to examine the relations among parental personality, parents' emotional expressivity and support, and children's and adolescents' sympathy and prosocial behavior. Observational and questionnaire data were collected at three assessment points (each approximately 4 years apart) from 214 children when they were 4.5 to 8 years of age (T1) into early adolescence (12 to 16 years of age; T3). Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data and examine direct, mediating, and moderating relations among the variables. Whereas correlation analysis indicated support for across time relations among parental personality, parents' emotional expressivity, and children's sympathy and prosocial behavior, these relations were only modestly supported in the models. The models did indicate concurrent relations among these constructs, particularly at T1. As expected, early parental agreeableness and neuroticism were positively related to concurrent measures of parents' positive and negative emotional expressivity, respectively. Parents' positive and negative expressivity were, respectively, positively and negatively related to sympathy. Results also indicated that early sympathy predicted adolescent sympathy and prosocial behavior. Although parents' expressivity did not mediate the relation between parental personality and children's prosocial behavior, and sympathy did not mediate the relations between parental personality or parents' expressivity and prosocial behavior in the models, correlations did indicate that these relations may exist. In general, the findings of this study suggest that the patterns of relations among parental personality, parents' emotional expressivity, and child sympathy are established early and carried forward from childhood to early adolescence, predicting T3 sympathy and prosocial behavior.;Significant sex differences were also found for the effects of parenting suggesting that while positive emotional expressivity is positively related to positive moral development for boys, total expressivity (both positive and negative expressivity) is important in the parent-daughter relationship (including perceptions of parent support) and in the development of sympathy and prosocial behavior. Implications for future research were also discussed.