Empathy and altruistic behavior are more crucial abilities for pre-service teachers to possess when compared with other study fields. The relationship between empathy and altruistic behavior in Chinese pre-service teachers and their underlying mechanisms, however, has received relatively little attention in the literature. Therefore, the goal of the current study was to examine the links between study fields, self-control, emotional empathy, and altruistic preferences among undergraduates and graduates in five Chinese universities with the Interpersonal Reactivity Index-C Questionnaire, the Self-Control Scale, (...) and the Chinese Self-Report Altruism Scale tests. The results showed a significant difference between pre-service and non-pre-service teachers in empathic concern and self-control. Furthermore, empathic concern and altruistic behavior tendency of pre-service teachers were significantly higher than those of non-pre-service teachers. Moreover, mediation analyses indicated that empathic concern partially mediated the relationship between study fields and altruistic tendency. Moderated mediation analysis further revealed that self-control buffered the relation between empathic concern and altruistic behavior tendency. These results demonstrate that altruistic tendency of pre-service teachers is influenced by empathic concern and self-control. (shrink)

Recently, teacher emotions have become the focus of research in teacher education. Teacher emotions not only affect teachers themselves but also have an impact on their students. However, pre-service teachers’ emotions have been neglected. This study is based on a qualitative analysis of online emotional diaries related to emotional experience expression by 120 Chinese pre-service teachers before, during, and after teaching practice. The results in this study show three characteristics of pre-service teachers’ emotional experiences: the overall positive emotions are higher (...) than negative emotions; “caring” and “nervous” are the most typical emotions and variability in emotional experience across gender and internship schools. Then, it is surprising that pre-service teachers’ emotional trajectories are complex and dynamic, positive emotions are decreasing, and negative emotions increase as time goes by. Finally, from the perspective of emotional experience sources, organizational factors affect the emotional experience, personal factors, and background factors. (shrink)