Relationship Between Negative Life Events And Altruistic Behaviors Of Middle School Students:The Mediating Role Of Empathy

Altruistic behaviour mainly fall within the scope of two categories.One refers to the behaviour of helping others conducted by individuals under the requirements of social norms,and this kind of behaviour is subjected to the restriction of social judgment or moral standards.The other kind of behaviour,which is relative to egoistic behaviour,refers to the sort of spontaneous,active and voluntary social behaviour from which behaviour receiver benefit a lot,and it is a term used to describe a person who has the sole purpose of helping others,only focuses on altruistic results,and does not expect any spiritual or material reward.Negative life events refer to major events that have negative effects on the physical and mental development of middle school students in daily life,and such events include failure in examination,lovelorn love,divorce of parents,major physical diseases,interpersonal conflicts,maladjustment of life and so on.Actually,such events are not conducive to the physical and mental health and harmonious development of middle school students.Empathy is known as the emotional(affective)response automatically generated on the basis of the top-down control process.That is,an individual has reaction to certain emotion and affection through direct experience,imagination and cognitive empathy(understanding),and then realizes that the source of emotion is not his own.The purpose of this paper is to examine of negative life events on altruistic behaviors and the mediating role of empathy,as well as the mutual influence mechanism of middle school students,so as to provide reference for the moral education of middle school students.Using a sample of 1933 middle school students from five middle schools in Wuhu,Tongling,Fuyang,Huaibei and Hangzhou,with Altruistic Behavior Questionnaire,Self Report Scale of Adolescent Life Events and Basic Empathy Scale.The analysis showed asfollows:(1)There is a significant difference available in grade and gender in the aspects of total scores and various dimensions obtained from altruistic behaviour of middle school students;there is no significant difference in the total scores and dimensions of altruistic behaviour on whether middle school students are the only children in a family;Meanwhile,in the aspect of the origins of students,there are significant differences in the dimensions about the responsibility of altruistic behaviour,respect and care to others;as for whether middle school students are class leaders or not,there is a significant difference in other dimensions and total score except the dimension of altruistic behaviour.(2)There is a significant difference available in grade,whether they are the only child,the origin of students and whether they are class leaders in the aspects of total scores and various dimensions obtained from negative life events;in terms of gender,other dimensions and total scores also show significant differences except the dimension of interpersonal stress.(3)There is a significant difference available in gender in the aspects of total scores and various dimensions obtained from empathy of middle school students;among them,there is significant difference available in cognitive empathy in the aspects of grades and whether they are class leaders;In addition,there is significant difference available in affective empathy and the total score of empathy in the aspects of whether they are the only children and the origin of the students.(4)Negative life events had positive predictive effect on empathy;empathy had positive predictive effect on altruistic behavior;negative life events had negative predictive effect on altruistic behavior.(5)Empathy of middle school students play a partial mediating role in the relationship between negative life events and altruistic behaviors.