The Effect of Empathy and Social Evaluation on Children's Prosocial Behaviors

공감과 사회적 평가가 아동의 친사회적 행동에 미치는 영향

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of selected internal and situational factors on children's prosocial behaviors. While child's sex and trait empathy were chosen as internal factors, state empathy and social evaluation were regarded as situational factors. The subjects were 72 bays and 72 girls chosen from 288 eleven-year-olds. This selection was based on their emplathic scores measured by the Bryant Empathy Scale (1982). Half of the 144 children belonged to the high-trait empathic group and the other half to the low-trait empathic group. Within each of the high-and the low-trait empathic groups, equal numbers of boys and girls were randomly assigned to one of the two state empathy conditions and two social evaluation conditions. The state empathy conditions were divided into the arousal condition and the disregarding condition. To control social evaluation, subjects were led to believe that the experimenter either would or would not evaluate their donation of colorful ball-point pens to handicapped children. The data was analyzed by 4-way ANOVA [sex(2)${\times}$trait empathy(2)${\times}$state empathy(2)${\times}$social evaluation(2)]. The results were that (1) children's prosocial behaviors were significantly different by sex, state empathy, and social evaluation, and (2) children's prosocial behaviors were not significantly different by their trait empathy level.