The Effect Of The Moral Sense Of Life On Prosocial Behavior:Empathy As A Mediator

Recently,more and more attention has been given to teenagers' suicide and harm behaviors.How to make students treat their lives and others' lives properly becomes an important education issue.This dissertation focuses on moral sense of life in order to reduce the suicide rate of teenagers,improve students' mental health,and helps them to realize their potentials in individual level.Meanwhile,it benefits to the integrity of family,the harmony and stability of society in social level.The first study aimed to develop the scale of moral sense of life.First,we developed the scale of moral sense of life,including the dimension of respect and awe for life,and dimension of care and protect for life.Through three tests and two revisions,the final scale comprised 8 items.The ? coefficients was 0.77,the results showed that the validity and reliability of the scale reached the statistical measurement standard.Then we explored the correlation between moral sense of life and meaning in life,prosocial behavior,empathy,aggressive behavior,depression and social approval.The results showed that the scale of moral sense of life was positively correlated with meaning in life and prosocial behavior,and the correlation degree is not very high.Besides,moral sense of life was negatively correlated with depression and aggressive behavior,indicating that the scale of moral sense of life had good discriminant validity and convergent validity.Therefore,the scale of moral sense of life developed in study 1 had good reliability,construct validity,discriminant validity and convergent validity,and it can be used as an operational tool to evaluate moral sense of life.The second study explored the influence of empathy on the moral sense of life and prosocial behavior.Through the mediation analysis of the moral sense of life,the prosocial behavior,empathy and social approbation,the results showed that the mediating effect of empathy in the process of the sense of morality and prosocial behavior was significant.The final study focused on the influence of empathy between the sense of morality and donation through experiment method.This paper explores the mediating role of empathy in the state of the sense of morality and donation behavior.The experiment was designed with a single factor,and the independent variable was the sense of morality,which was divided into two levels(awakening and not awakening),and the mediator variable was state empathy,dependent variables was donation behavior.The results showed that the mediating effect of empathy between moral sense of life and donation behavior was significant,indicating that the induced moral sense of life promoted empathy and increased the donation behavior.Therefore,moral sense of life is a sense of respect and awe for life,care and protection for life,and it is not only a personality trait,but also a state.These studies suggest that moral sense of life,at trait and state level,can lead to more prosocial behavior,and empathy is an important psychological mechanism between them,that is to say,moral sense of life can enhance empathy,and thus promotes prosocial behavior.