Abstract
This study examined the role of three sympathy-related processes—cognitive, affective, and motivational—in adolescents' self-reports of prosocial response to distress in friends and acquaintances. Questionnaires and responses to a simulation involving four videotaped episodes in which an adolescent was victimized were used to assess sympathy-related processes and reported prosocial response in 89 high-school pupils. In general, both dispositional and situational measures of cognitive understanding, perspective-taking, integrative goals, and sympathy were positively intercorrelated, and singly, they were positively associated with reported prosocial response. In the questionnaire data, a predominance of sympathy versus personal distress was associated with higher levels of reported prosocial response. Results were in the same direction for the simulation data, though not statistically significant. In both sets of data, a predominance of integrative goals versus self-enhancing goals was associated with higher levels of reported prosocial response. These findings suggest that, in adolescents, affective and motivational responses can be differentiated along a dimension of other- versus self-orientation and that these orientations may be associated with different responses to distress in peers.
