关键词: 父母温暖, 亲社会行为, 集体取向, 儿童晚期, 追踪研究

Abstract: Prosocial behavior is a major aspect of social functioning in childhood and adolescence. Parents have consistently been identified as salient socialization agents in fostering children’s prosocial behavior. Previous studies have explored the relations between parental warmth and children’s prosocial behavior from the perspectives of social learning and social cognitive theories. However, cultural socialization theories have proposed that parents also play a central role in the process of cultural socialization. It remains unclear, especially in non-Western countries, whether children’s cultural orientation (i.e., group orientation) serves as an underlying mechanism linking parental warmth and children’s prosocial behavior. Group orientation, characterized by concern for group welfare and collective harmony, has been found to be significantly associated with children’s prosocial behavior. To address these gaps, this study examined the transactional relations among perceived parental warmth, children's group orientation, and children's prosocial behavior along with the mediating effects of children’s group orientation. Multi-wave longitudinal data were collected each year from Grades 4 to 6 in a sample of five randomly selected regular public elementary schools in China (initial N = 1033; 49.5% girls; initial Mage = 10.28 years, SD = 0.69). Data on parental warmth, group orientation, and prosocial behavior were collected from multiple sources including self-reports and teacher ratings. Measurement invariance tests were first conducted for the measures with multiple indicators across three times of measurement. Next, latent cross-lagged panel models were constructed to examine the relations among maternal/paternal warmth, group orientation and prosocial behavior after controlling children’s gender and parental educational level. We also conducted multigroup analyses to examine gender differences in the models. The results showed that maternal warmth positively predicted children’s prosocial behavior, and children’s prosocial behavior positively predicted paternal warmth. Both paternal and maternal warmth positively predicted children’s group orientation, which in turn predicted more children’s prosocial behavior, suggesting that group orientation was a mediator of the contributions of parental warmth to prosocial behavior. In addition, prosocial behavior also positively predicted group orientation. Multigroup analyses showed no significant gender differences in the cross-lagged paths. The findings highlight the critical role that group orientation plays in the link between parental warmth and children’s prosocial behavior, and yield significant implications for early interventions aimed to promote children’s prosocial behaviors.

Key words: parental warmth, prosocial behavior, group orientation, late childhood, longitudinal study