The Relation between Prosocial Behavior and Adolescents’ Emotional Understanding

Abstract

This paper discusses the relationship between adolescents’ prosocial behavior and their emotional understanding abilities. Through reviewing relevant literature, this paper explored the positive effects of different groups' emotional understanding on adolescent prosocial behavior. The findings indicate that for others, whether it is a vulnerable group or a non-vulnerable group, a higher level of emotional understanding ability can bring a higher tendency towards pro social behavior to adolescents; On the contrary, lower emotional understanding abilities not only lead to a decrease in prosocial tendencies, but also lead to some antisocial behaviors, including violent behavior. On the other hand, for adolescent individuals, a higher level of emotional understanding ability will enable them to understand the correlation between prosocial behavior and their own emotional cognition, thus making them more inclined to implement prosocial behavior; On the contrary, lower emotional comprehension skills can lead them to overlook the correlation between emotions and current events, and engage in non pro social behaviors such as self-serving lying. This paper can provide some reference for research in relative fields. Future research should expand the scope of the subjects, such as more various age groups, and include them in longitudinal dynamic tracking studies, and calculate the impact of third-party factors. Also, research need to include individual personality differences, to find the most balanced relationship between adolescent emotional understanding and prosocial behavior.