Abstract
Cognitive and emotional processes as predictors of pro-social behaviour and aggressive conduct: empathy as a modulating factor. The objective of this research is to review some cognitive and emotional processes that regulate pro-social behaviour and aggressive conduct in adolescence, emphasis being placed on empathic processes. An empirical study has been carried out including 1,285 randomly selected adolescents (aged 13-18, 698 male / 597 female). The discriminating analyses conducted point out that emotional processes reach higher correlation with aggressive conduct and pro-social behaviour, emotional instability standing out as the main aggressiveness predictor, and non-impulsive, "positive" and empathic emotionality as the best predictor for pro-social behaviour. On the contrary, prosocial reasoning processes followed by adolescents in opting for a given help conduct are less relevant to the prediction of such behaviours.
