Inhibitory Control And Prosocial Lying In Children: Multiple Mediating Effects Of Empathy And Emotional Understanding

Inhibitory control has an important impact on children’s prosocial lying.In recent years,studies have found that the development of lying behavior is inseparable from the cognitive development of children.However,there are few studies on the influence mechanism of inhibitory control on children’s prosocial lying.This study intends to explore the influence mechanism of inhibitory control on children’s prosocial lying from the perspective of empathy and emotional understanding.In study 1,109 primary school students aged 8～11 were selected as subjects.Through stroop task,GO/NOGO task,Chinese adolescent version of cognitive and emotional empathy scale,and the adapted version of the disappointment gift paradigm,the primary school students’ inhibitory control ability,empathy and empathy were measured respectively.Prosocial Lying Behavior,to explore the relationship between inhibitory control(including interference inhibition and response inhibition)and prosocial lying in children.The results showed that only the stroop task(interference inhibition)in inhibitory control was significantly negatively correlated with its level of empathy and prosocial lying behavior,while empathy was significantly positively correlated with children’s prosocial lying.There is a complete mediating effect between lying.In study 2,109 primary school students aged 8～12 were selected as subjects,and the inhibitory control of primary school students was measured by stroop task,GO/NOGO task,Chinese adolescent version of cognitive and emotional empathy scale,emotional understanding test,and the adapted version of the disappointment gift paradigm.Competence,empathy,emotional understanding tests,and prosocial lying behaviors,to further explore the relationship between inhibitory control and prosocial lying in children.The results showed that,as in Study 1,only the stroop task(interference inhibition)in inhibitory control was significantly negatively correlated with children’s empathy level,emotional understanding and prosocial lying behavior,and both empathy and emotional understanding were significantly positively correlated with children’s prosocial lying.There was a significant positive correlation between emotion and emotion understanding.Furthermore,the mediating effect test showed that emotional understanding partially mediated the relationship between inhibitory control and prosocial lying.The final chain mediation test showed that empathy and emotional understanding played multiple mediating roles between inhibitory control and children’s prosocial lying.The results show that inhibitory control affects children’s prosocial lying through two pathways: one is the single mediating effect of empathy;the other is the serial mediation pathway of empathy→emotional understanding ability.