Positive and Negative Affect: Impact on Empathy and Prosocial Behaviour among College Going Adolescents

Abstract

The positive affect means the different level of moods of an individual on subjective basis such as joy, interest and being alert. It refers to the condition where the individual have positive emotions and feelings involving physiological arousal, thinking process and behaviour. Positive affect also involving the interaction of an individual with the environment and its surroundings. The people shows the characteristics of being full of energy, active, are generally high on positive affect and characteristics like sad, lethargic, stress are examples of the negative affect. Empathy refers to the different kind of experiences. The researchers have defined empathy as ability of a person to feel other’s emotions including the feeling and thinking. Therefore it includes an experience that involves understanding others conditions or emotions from their perspective. Empathy increases the prosocial behaviour. The prosocial behaviour means actions which are positive in nature but does benefit others and it includes the moral values, sense of responsibility and does not have any personal gains from such behaviour. It is a kind of voluntary actions that benefits not only the individual itself but also the society as a whole. The aim of the current investigation was to study the impact of positive and negative affect on empathy and prosocial behaviour. For this study, Positive and negative affect scale (PANAS; Watson et al., 1988), Empathy scale (Levine et al., 2009), and Prosocial Tendencies Measure scale (Randall et al., 2003) were administered to the sample of 100 students in the age range of 18-21 years. The sample was taken from different colleges of Chandigarh. An inter-correlation matrix was calculated to see the relationship. The results have shown significant and positive relationship between positive affect, empathy and prosocial behavior. The correlation between positive and empathy is (r = 0.33) and positive affect and prosocial behavior is (r = 0.30). The significant and negative relationship is found between negative affect, empathy and prosocial behavior. The correlation between negative affect and empathy is(r = -0.29) and negative affect and prosocial behavior is (r = -0.27). The result is found to be significant at 0.01 levels.