Empathy, anger, guilt: Emotions and prosocial behaviour.

Along with anger, the social emotions of empathy and guilt influence children’s social behaviours in important ways, and are also implicated in broader aspects of behaviour such as self-regulation (ego control). Despite their importance, few studies have assessed these emotions simultaneously or across sources. We obtained measures from 99 children (Mage 9.7 years, range: 613.3; 66% girls), their fathers, mothers, teachers, and best friends. As expected, more empathic children scored higher on adaptive guilt and lower on anger. In path models, emotions were strongly related to behaviours in expected directions. Empathy and adaptive guilt accounted for over 50% of the variance in friendly behaviour, independently of anger. Adaptive guilt and anger predicted 42% of the variance in bullying behaviours, 51% of the variance in cooperative behaviour, 33% of the variance in persistence (a measure of ego overcontrol), and 44% of the variance in ego undercontrol. Present findings help differentiate the contributions of empathy, guilt, and anger to various social behaviours and suggest important links between emotions, self-regulation, and prosocial behaviour.