Empathic sensitiveness, agreeableness, attitude toward social responsibility norm, and emotions as predictors of helping behavior in young women and men

The study (N = 300) applied the semi-experimental paradigm to examine observed helping behavior in real interaction between individuals. The experiment tested the observed helping behavior of the participants by measuring how many pens (range 0-50) the participants picked up that had been accidentally dropped by the experimenter, and their declarative helpfulness by asking how many days (range 0-14) they wished to keep a diary for research purposes voluntarily. Participants' emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear) were elicited by asking them to recall personal stories related to their emotional experiences. The NEO-FFI and Empathic Sensitiveness Scale were used to measure personality traits. The attitude toward the social responsibility norm was estimated based on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Participants responded to the following statement: “We ought to help people whose fate depends on our actions and who need help, such as the poor and sick.”The research included an emotion manipulation check. The author used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) (Pennebaker et al., 2015) to capture the participant's emotional states reflected in their spoken descriptions of their recalled memories. Verbal texts were transcribed and analyzed using the LIWC2015 system, identifying words associated with psychologically relevant categories. This tool measures an utterance's emotional content, distinguishing the subcategories of positive affect, negative affect, anxiety, anger, and sadness. LIWC2015 calculates the degree to which affective categories of words are used in a text and converts these numbers to percentages.