The relation between prosociality and self-esteem from middle-adolescence to young adulthood

The present study examined the longitudinal relations between prosociality and self-esteem. Participants were 386 (50.3% males) middle adolescents (M-age = 15.6) assessed over a 10-year period until they entered into young adulthood (M-age = 25.7). First, multivariate latent curve analysis indicated that the developmental increase of prosociality was positively related to the parallel increase of self-esteem. Second. an autoregressive cross-lagged model revealed that the direct effect of prosociality on self-esteem was statistically significant but essentially negligible. These findings corroborated from a long-term longitudinal perspective previous studies highlighting the positive correlation between the development of prosociality and self-esteem, and pointed out to the need for further investigating the relation between the two constructs. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed. (c) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved