Personality And Empathy As Mediators Between Parenting Styles And Middle School Students' Altruistic Behavior

The altruistic behavior has been the focus of psychology, sociology and biology for a long time. Moral education is becoming more and more important along with the development of the society; it is not only helpful for adolescents' healthy growth and nurturing their altruistic character, but also benefit to the benign development of the whole society. With the gradual deepening of research of altruistic behavior, researchers found that altruistic behavior is related with many factors, in which personality and empathy play essential roles in predicting altruistic behavior while parenting style influence the development of personality and empathy of adolescent. Therefore, this research investigated the relationships among personality, empathy, parenting style and altruistic behavior of middle school students.This research selected 1100 students of one middle school of Shandong province from grade one to grade four as subjects, and adopts little five personality questionnaire, interpersonal reactivity index, s-EMBU-c and The Self-Report Altruism Scale Distinguished by the Recipient(the SRAS-DR) as measurement tools to investigate the relationships among the personality, empathy, parenting style and different kind of altruistic behavior(kin-altruism, reciprocal altruism and pure altruism). The conclusions are as follows.(1) There are significant gender differences among personality, empathy, parenting style and different kind of altruistic behavior. Male students receive more parental refusal and over-protection. While female students get higher score in conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotionality, empathy concern, personal distress, fantasy, reciprocal altruism and total scale of altruism.(2) All dimensions of adolescents' little five model can predict altruistic behavior. The extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness to experience predict altruistic behavior positively, while emotionality predicts altruistic behavior negatively. Parental emotional warmth predicts all the three kinds of altruistic behaviors and all the dimensions of the little five model of adolescent's personality.(3) The empathy concern, personal distress, fantasy and perspective taking of middle school students are positively related with maternal emotional warmth, while fantasy and perspective taking are related with paternal emotional warmth. Personal distress related with paternal refusal and parental over-protection positively. All three kinds of altruistic behaviors can be predicted by empathy concern, fantasy and perspective taking, while personal distress has nothing to do with all of the behaviors.(4) Parenting style influence middle school students' altruistic behaviors by influence their personality, which means that maternal emotional warmth influence middle school students' altruistic behaviors by influence their agreeableness, extroversion and conscientiousness. Meanwhile, paternal emotional warmth influence middle school students' altruistic behaviors by influence their emotionality and conscientiousness.(5) Parenting style influence middle school students' altruistic behaviors by influence their empathy. Empathy mediated in the relation between parental emotional warmth and altruism completely. Paternal emotional warmth influence middle school students' altruistic behaviors directly.(6) Gender does not act as moderator in neither model that different dimensions of personality of middle school students as mediators in the relationship between parenting style and altruistic behaviors nor model that empathy of middle school students as mediator in the relationship between parenting style and altruistic behaviors.