This study was carried out to understand middle school students' interpersonal relationships, hope and empathy, with emotional expression as the mediation variable in order to verify the structural relationships among and the mediation effect of the v...
This study was carried out to understand middle school students' interpersonal relationships, hope and empathy, with emotional expression as the mediation variable in order to verify the structural relationships among and the mediation effect of the variables. For the research, hope, empathy, emotional expression and interpersonal relationships were measured for 410 second-year students who attend either one of the two middle schools located in S., Gyeonggi-do, and the data of 392 students were used for the final analysis after excluding the data of 18 students which were often incomplete or untrustworthy. For the statistical processing of the collected data, SPSS 17.0 and LISREL 8.50 software were used and for model verification, an analysis of structural equation model was carried out.
The research questions and the hypotheses set of this study related to them are as follows:
Research Question No. 1. What relationships hope, sympathy, emotional expression and interpersonal relationships form?
Hypothesis 1-1. Hope will affect emotional expression positively.
Hypothesis 1-2. Empathy will affect emotional expression positively.
Hypothesis 1-3. Hope will affect interpersonal relationships positively.
Hypothesis 1-4. Empathy will affect interpersonal relationships positively.
Hypothesis 1-5. Emotional expression will affect interpersonal relationships positively.
Research Question No. 2. Will hope and empathy affect interpersonal relationships through emotional expression?
Hypothesis 2-1. Hope will affect interpersonal relationships through emotional expression
Hypothesis 2-2. empathy will affect interpersonal relationships through emotional expression.
The summarization of the results of this study is as follows:
First, the level of hope did not affect emotional expression positively.
Second, sympathizing ability affected emotional expression positively. In other words, the higher empathizing ability, the higher emotional expression ability.
Third, the level of hope affected interpersonal relationships positively. In other words, the higher the level of hope, the better interpersonal relationships.
Fourth, empathizing ability affected interpersonal relationships positively. Through this result, it was predicted that the level of empathy for others would affect interpersonal relationships positively.
Fifth, emotional expression affected interpersonal relationships positively. Through this result, it was shown that the better emotional expression, the higher the possibility of good interpersonal relationships.
Sixth, hope directly affected interpersonal relationships without the mediation of emotional expression.
Seventh, empathy affected interpersonal relationships through emotional expression. In other words, the higher the level of empathy was, the better emotional expression ability got and a person who expressed his or her emotions well had better ability of interpersonal relationships.
This study proved that among many variables considered as important factors in interpersonal relationships, especially hope, empathy and emotional expression have significant impacts on interpersonal relationships. In particular, judging from the fact that emotional expressions helps empathy affect interpersonal relationships, the promotion of emotional expression seems to promote ultimately the interpersonal relationships positively. Along with this, the results of this study showed that it is significant to understand the importance of the related variables affecting interpersonal relationships newly and at the same time to provide the base and information of educational and psychological interventions for the youths who further suffer from difficulties in interpersonal relationships.
Meanwhile, since, this study proved that hope, empathy and emotional expression affect interpersonal relationships, in the future studies, the relationships among the latent variables of each variable should be examined. In addition, studies on the variables which affect the formation of youths' interpersonal relationships must be carried out continuously.