Do Good, Feel Good: The Relation between Prosociality and Self-esteem during Adolescence and Early Adulthood
Year: 2013
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: The present longitudinal study examined the relation between prosociality and selfesteem over time.Participants were 386 middle adolescents (50.3% males) assessed over a 10year period until they entered into young adulthood.The mean age of participants was 15.6 years at the beginning of the study and 25.7 years at the end.Analyses were based on five time-points.First, multivariate latent curve analysis indicated that the developmental increase of prosociality was positively related to the parallel increase of self-esteem.Then, an autoregressive crosslagged revealed that, at each time point, prosociality had a small but statistically significant effect in predicting later self-esteem above and beyond its high stability (both for males and females).Self-esteem, instead, did not predict prosociality.These findings corroborated from a longitudinal perspective previous studies highlighting the benefits of behaving prosocially for the actor in terms of an increased perception of self-worth.The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.
Author: ZUFFIANO', ANTONIO
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6999906598