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Disentangling between- and within-person associations between empathy and prosocial behaviours during early
Alexia Carrizales1, Susan Branje2, Lyda Lannegrand3
1Laboratory of Psychology EA3188, University Franche-Comté, Besançon, France; Laboratory of Psychology EA4139, University of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France.
Introduction:
Although empathy has been found to be related to prosocial behaviour, little is known about the longitudinal links between these two concepts during early adolescence, a unique window into developmental changes on empathy and prosocial behaviour considering the physical, cognitive, socio-emotional and contextual changes occurring during this period. Even though changes in adolescent empathy have been associated to changes in adolescent prosocial behaviour, studies examining this link on the within-person level are lacking. The present study investigated the within-adolescents longitudinal relations among empathy and prosocial behaviour.
Methods:
383 French adolescents (MageT1 = 12.15, 50.4% male) reported on their empathy and prosocial behaviour each year across three years. In order to disentangle between-adolescent differences from within-adolescent processes, Random-Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Models were applied.
Results:
At the between-person level, there was a strong positive association between empathy and prosocial behaviour. At the within-person level, adolescents who reported more empathy than usual reported higher than usual prosocial behaviour one year later.
Conclusions:
Adolescents with higher empathy compared to their peers tended to be those who reported higher prosocial behaviour. Changes in empathy within-adolescents were related to later within-adolescents' change in prosocial behaviour.
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