Moral identity moral emotions and maladaptive personality traits among adolescents in south korea

Abstract

The rule of survival of the fittest often thwarted the leap towards holistic development. How does morality associate with personality in adolescent development? Drawing on the theories of Augusto Blasi and Gordon Allport, the present study took a morality-personality integrative approach to adolescent development and viewed moral identity centrality as an agentic drive for their holistic growth. It aimed to determine whether moral identity centrality, other-praising moral emotion, and personality dysfunction of maladaptive personality traits are coherent in predicting antisocial behaviour in a sample of 436 Korean adolescents (M = 15.71 years, SD = .70; female 48.4%). The present study set up three hypotheses in the structural relationship of research variables (i.e., moral identity centrality, other-praising moral emotion, personality dysfunction of maladaptive personality traits and antisocial behaviour). Hypothesis 1: Personality dysfunction of multiple maladaptive personality traits predicts antisocial behaviour. Hypothesis 2: Other-praising moral emotion and personality dysfunction mediate moral identity centrality and antisocial behaviour. Hypothesis 3: Sex does not make notable differences in the structural relationship of research variables. The study analyzed the data mainly through structural equation modelling (SEM). As a result, all hypotheses were accepted. First, four multiple maladaptive traits, i.e., negative affectivity, antagonism, disinhibition, and psychoticism, significantly predicted adolescents antisocial behaviour (and#946; = .791, p lt .001) (Hypothesis 1). Second, the modified structural model showed a serial multiple mediation effect of other-praising moral emotion and personality dysfunction between moral identity centrality and antisocial behaviour (Hypothesis 2). Third, multi-group analyses showed apparent coherence among research variables regardless of sex (Hypothesis 3).