An Analysis Exploring the Mediating Role of Empathy Between Personality Traits and Antisocial Behavior

Abstract

Adolescent antisocial behavior, especially juvenile delinquency, has been a hot issue in society. Studies have been conducted to explore how antisocial behavior and personality traits are intercorrelated, as well as how antisocial behavior and empathy are related to one another. However, few studies have focused on investigating the interplay between empathy, antisocial behavior, and personality traits. This paper aims to fill this gap by inferring how personality traits and empathy level affect the conduction of antisocial behaviors for adolescents through a literature review. Agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism, which are three vital personality traits in the big five personality trait test, are found to be correlated with antisocial behavior, and agreeableness, extraction, and neuroticism are correlated with empathy. So this review focus on two personality traits: agreeableness and neuroticism. It states that empathy mediates the interaction between the two personality traits and antisocial behaviors during adolescence years. It also gives suggestions that parents and teachers should pay more attention to adolescents with high neuroticism or low agreeableness. It highlights that people can intervene in adolescents’ antisocial behavior through intervene in adolescents’ empathy.