Indirect relations of mindful awareness with different forms of prosocial actions within college students: The mediating role of empathy

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between mindfulness and different types of pro-social behaviors through the mediating agent of empathy. Participants included 449 university students (336 female, 113 male) from various departments of three different universities in Istanbul, Turkey. The study used the Pro-social Tendencies Measure (Carlo and Randall Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 31, 31–44 2002), Mindful Attention Awareness Scale-Adolescent version (Brown et al. Psychological Assessment, 23, 1023–1033 2011) and Toronto Empathy Scale (Spreng et al. Journal of Personality Assessment, 91, 62–71 2009) as data collection tools. A path analysis showed that mindfulness has a significantly positive relationship with empathy, while empathy has a meaningfully negative relationship with public pro-social behaviors, and positive relations with emotional pro-social behaviors, altruistic pro-social behaviors, dire pro-social behaviors, compliant pro-social behaviors and anonymous pro-social behaviors. The proposed model explained 10% variance in public pro-social behaviors, 12% variance in emotional pro-social behaviors, 17% variance in altruistic pro-social behaviors, 7% variance in dire pro-social behaviors, 18% variance in compliant pro-social behaviors and 3% variance in anonymous pro-social behaviors.