The development of prosocial behavior among adolescents: A positive psychology perspective

Autor: E. Scott Huebner, Yuji You, Huinan Hu, Yu Ling, Hongmei Yuan
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: Current Psychology. 42:9734-9742
ISSN: 1936-4733
1046-1310
DOI: 10.1007/s12144-021-02255-9
Popis: We investigated the development of individual differences in prosocial behavior among adolescents from the perspective of positive psychology. Specifically, derived from the engine model of well-being (Jayawickreme et al., 2012), we examined a social-cognitive-motivational (chain) mediation model of adolescents’ prosocial behavior, in which social support was hypothesized to relate to self-esteem, which in turn was hypothesized to relate to hope, which in turn was hypothesized to relate to prosocial behavior. A total of 1681 adolescents (802 boys and 879 girls; ages = 12–19 years, M = 15.86, SD = 1.72) from Mainland China completed the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, Rosenberg Self Esteem Scale, Children’s Hope Scale and the Prosocial Behavior subscale of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Social support was associated positively with the adolescents’ self-esteem, hope and prosocial behavior, and prosocial behavior was associated positively with self-esteem and hope. Structural equation modeling analyses showed that self-esteem and hope fully mediated the relation between social support and prosocial behavior, with hope accounting for 45.12% and the path from self-esteem to hope accounting for 54.88% of the relation between social support and adolescents’ prosocial behavior, providing support for the chain mediation model. The limitations of the study and the significance of the findings for promoting adolescents’ prosocial behavior are discussed.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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