Self-esteem Moderated The Relationship Between Acute Psychological Stress And Prosocial Behaviors

Prosocial behavior is referred to as those behaviors which are beneficial to other persons.Furthermore,people often exhibit presocial behaviors under the stress context of the daily life.In additional to the primary physiological fight-or-flight responses to stress for both males and females,researchers proposed the “tend and befriend” hypothesis which females respond to stress by engaging in nurturing activities and by affiliating with social groups to reduce risk.However,the results of previous studies on the positive effect of stress on pro-social behavior were inconsistent,due to the different experimental paradigms,the indexes of assessing the reactivity of those acute psychological stresses,and other individual factors.Moreover,these available studies paid relatively less attention to the role of personality factors in the relationship between stress and prosocial behaviors.Self-esteem is considered as an important personality factor which could relieve individual response to stress and influence their proscial behaviors.Thus,it is necessary for researchers to explore the moderating role of self-esteem in the relationship stress and proscial behavior.The results showed that: Firstly,there was a higher score of prosocial behavior in stress group than a score of prosocial behavior in control group.Secondly,the relations between baseline RSA and the prosocial behaviors during either the speech task or the mental arithmetic task were not significant.Thirdly,RSA reactivities during the mental arithmetic task but not the speech task were significantly and negatively related to the post-task prosocial behavior.Fourthly,Self-esteem moderated the relationship between baseline RSA and pro-social behavior.That is,whereas among those individuals with the lower level of self-esteem,baseline RSA was significantly and negatively related to post-speech pro-social behavior,the relationship between baseline RSA and post-task prosocial behavior was not significant among individuals with the lower level of self-esteem.Fifthly,self-esteem moderated the RSA-R and prosoical behaviors.That is,the significant and negative relationship between RSA-R and post-task prosocial behavior were found in the group with the low level of self-esteem instead of the group with thehigher level of self-esteem.Finally,the baseline RSA and RSA-R and pro-social behavior did not vary across gender.In conclusion: Firstly,exposure to acute psychological stress reduces the possibility of individual exhibiting prosocial behavior,in spite of male or female.Secondly,self-esteem moderates the relationship between acute psychological stress and pro-social behavior.That is,whereas individuals with the low level of self-esteem exhibit less proscial behaviors after exposure to acute psychological stress,the negative effect is not found among individuals with the higher level of self-esteem.Finally,self-esteem moderates the relationship resting vague tone and proscial behaviors.That is,the negative relationship between resting vague tone and proscial behaviors only exist among those individuals with the low level of self-esteem but individuals with the higher level of self-esteem.