The moral acts of 19 dyads of 4-year-olds in a cognitively simplified version of Prisoner's Dilemma were analyzed in relationship to their friendship, emotions, and processes of conflict resolution. Degree of friendship was rated by teachers; two sociologists used a Q-sort of Group Processes to describe the dyads' interactions; the emotions of each child were coded from videotape--independently...

This meta-analytic review of 42 studies covering 8,009 participants (ages 4-20) examines the relation of moral emotion attributions to prosocial and antisocial behavior. A significant association is found between moral emotion attributions and prosocial and antisocial behaviors (d = .26, 95% CI [.15, .38]; d = .39, 95% CI [.29, .49]). Effect sizes differ considerably across studies and this het...

This study examined links between inhibitory control, moral emotions (sympathy and guilt), and reparative behavior in an ethnically diverse sample of 4- and 8-year-olds (N = 162). Caregivers reported their children's reparative behavior, inhibitory control, and moral emotions through a questionnaire, and children reported their guilt feelings in response to a series of vignettes depicting moral...

Recent theorizations on the cognitive process of moral judgment have focused on the role of intuitions and emotions, marking a departure from previous emphasis on conscious, step-by-step reasoning. My study investigated how being in a disgusted mood state affects moral judgment. Participants were induced to enter a disgusted mood state through listening to disgusting sounds and reading disgusti...

Recent research has begun to elucidate the neural basis of higher order social concepts, such as the mechanisms involved in intergroup relations, and moral judgments. Most theories have concentrated on higher order emotions, such as guilt, shame, or empathy, as core mechanisms. Accordingly, psychopharmacological and neurobiological studies have investigated the effects of manipulating serotonin...

This study examines whether German and Portuguese fiveto six-, and eightto nine-year-old children distinguish between the feelings attributed to a victimizer or to themselves if they were the victimizers in two hypothetical moral violations (stealing and breaking a promise), and how they morally evaluate the emotions they attribute to victimizers and the person of the victimizer. The results sh...

This study examines whether German and Portuguese 5to 6-, and 8to 9-year-old children distinguish between the feelings attributed to a victimizer or to themselves if they were the victimizers in two hypothetical moral violations (stealing and breaking a promise), and how they morally evaluate the emotions they attribute to victimizers and the person of the victimizer. The results showed that in...

In literary and drama criticism, emotions, and moral emotions in particular, have been pointed out as one of characterizing features of stories. In this paper, we propose to model story characters as value-based emotional agents, who appraise their own and others’ actions based on their desires and values, and feel the appropriate moral emotions in response to narrative situations that challeng...

Informal social control is the communication of disapproval by one individual to another individual (the perpetrator) who has transgressed a social norm. The present research examined the conditions under which social control provokes moral versus angry emotions in the perpetrator. The roles of perceived deviance and the appraisal of the legitimacy of social control as predictors of these emoti...

Two studies examine the extent to which moral identity and moral disengagement jointly drive reactions to war. Study 1 Wnds support for a hypothesized positive relationship between moral disengagement and the perceived morality of a highly punitive response to the perpetuators of the September 11th attacks. It also Wnds that this eVect was eliminated for participants who place high self-importa...