Helping for the sake of helping: Can altruism be predicted from a child’s temperament, selfesteem, and parents’ meta-emotion?
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Date
2011-04-28
Authors
Terauds, Katherine
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Mount Saint Vincent University
Abstract
Altruism is a voluntary prosocial behaviour with the intention of benefiting another
person (Kakavoulis, 1998). Multiple factors may be related to altruism, such as a child’s
temperament, parental emotional style, and self-esteem. The present study aimed to assess the
relative contributions of these factors to children’s altruistic behaviour. Children, aged 11 and 12,
and their parents, participated in the study. Children completed self-ratings of altruism and selfesteem
while parents completed ratings of parental meta-emotion and children’s temperament. It
was expected that children with high self-esteem and who were high in sociability but low in
shyness, and who had parents that espoused an emotion-coaching parenting style would rate
higher on altruistic tendencies than children who had lower self-esteem, were lower in
sociability, higher in shyness, and had parents who espoused a dismissing parental emotional
style. Emotion-coaching and emotion-dismissing parenting styles were found to be related to
each other. Shyness was negative correlated with sociability and positively correlated to self-esteem.
No variables were significantly correlated with children’s altruistic tendency. Results
are discussed in terms of all children displaying a tendency to be altruistic and relevance to the
school setting.
Description
Keywords
Altruism in children , Temperment in children , Self-esteem in children , Parenting