Question about the term ‘‘mediating‘‘
Please direct me to the correct sub if this is not it. I am trying to understand a study with the following objectives:
‘‘Research on the potential mediating role of sympathy on the relations between parenting and moral behaviors, especially among adolescents.‘‘
‘‘We hypothesized that sympathy might mediate the relations between parenting styles/practices and prosocial behaviors, and that parenting style might predict parenting practices, which in turn might predict sympathy, which in turn might predict prosocial behaviors.‘‘
The researchers gave a questionnaire to parents and kids, in which parenting styles and attitudes about the self were surveyed. The kids got a sympathy scale which determined how sympathetic they were statistically.
My question is, what does mediate refer to here? Does it mean that sympathy effects the resulting behaviors? Is the assumption that the specific parenting style (giving material rewards in this case) produces sympathy.
For the graphic above, the authors stated that ‘‘sympathy mediated the relations between Social Rewards and dire, compliant, emotional, and anonymous prosocial behaviors.‘‘
I feel like I kind of understand it but not completely. Any help would be appreciated.