Teacher-Student Relationships, Empathy, and Prosocial Behaviors: Examining Between- and Within-Person Relations

Adolescents start to understand complex abstract concepts related to empathy and then engage in more costly prosocial behaviors. Positive teacher-student relationships, as the important environmental system, also promote adolescents' prosocial behaviors. Understanding whether positive teacher-student relationships can inspire adolescents to engage in more prosocial behaviors via empathy matters for improving social harmony. However, no study has systematically examined the relation between teacher-student relationships and prosocial behaviors at the within-person level, the mediating role of empathy between them, and the moderator of sex among these associations. More importantly, the examination of within-person relations would reveal the causal associations among these variables. Thus, framed in the developmental cascade perspective, the current study included 2407 Chinese adolescents (50.23% girl, M_age = 12.75, SD = 0.58 at T1) from seven schools over three time points with a one-year interval, and investigated the dynamic associations among teacher-student relationships, empathy, and prosocial behaviors by using the random intercept cross-lagged models. Results showed that the random intercepts of teacher-student relationships, empathy, and prosocial behaviors were significantly positively associated. At the within-person level, teacher-student relationships at T2 played a mediating role in the relation between the prosocial behaviors at T1 and T3. And, higher levels of teacher-student relationships at T1 lead to an increase in cognitive empathy at T2. Cognitive empathy stably predicted subsequent prosocial behaviors, and prosocial behaviors consistently predicted subsequent affective empathy. Teacher-student relationships indirectly predicted prosocial behaviors through cognitive empathy but not affective empathy. Sex differences were observed only in the model of cognitive empathy. The current findings contribute to the understanding of the relations among teacher-student relationships, empathy, and prosocial behaviors from the developmental cascade perspective, providing a novel scientific foundation for interventions aimed at promoting adolescents' prosocial behaviors.