Middle childhood seems to be crucial for the emergence of a moral identity, that is, an evaluative stance of how important it is for someone's sense of self to be moral. This study investigates the effects of moral identity on the neural processing of moral content in 10-year-old children. Participants were presented with scenes portraying…

"Teaching, Learning and Psychology" offers comprehensive coverage of contemporary psychological issues and new directions in education. With its focus on the non-deficit nature of human behaviours and positive psychology, the book emphasises the importance of appropriate pedagogical practices for effective learning. Comprehensive and…

This article addresses the question of why the emotions children and adolescents anticipate in the context of hypothetical scenarios have been repeatedly found to predict actual (im)moral behavior. It argues that a common motivational account of this relationship is insufficient. Instead, three links are proposed that connect cognitive…

In order to unify two major theories of moral judgment, a novel task is employed which combines elements of Kohlberg's stage theory and of the theory of information integration. In contrast to the format of Kohlberg's moral judgment interview, a nonverbal and quantitative response which makes low demands on verbal facility was used. Moral…

This study examined children's and young adults' use of three mental capacity criteria for treating an entity as one to which moral subjects have moral obligations, that is, as having moral status. In line with philosophical theorizing, these criteria were the capacity to (1) perceive; (2) suffer; and (3) think. In this study, 116 respondents aged…

Examines the effects of act- and outcome-oriented adult prohibitions on the moral judgments of seven- and nine-year-old children. Moral dilemmas portraying children in hospital settings were presented to children of ages six to nine years. (Author/SS)

When we attend to other people in pain, the neural circuits underpinning the processing of first-hand experience of pain are activated in the observer. This basic somatic sensorimotor resonance plays a critical role in the primitive building block of empathy and moral reasoning that relies on the sharing of others' distress. However, the…

Argues that, although Piaget's seminal work on children's use of intention and consequence information to make moral evaluations has spawned a substantial amount of research, progress in this area has been hampered by serious conceptual and methodological problems. Offers some methodological guidelines for conducting research in this area.…

Information integration in judgments of deservingness and fair shares was studied in three experiments with 76 children from four to eight years of age. Even the youngest children had a well-developed sense of equity, and no age trends were found in this respect. (Author/MP)

Reviews what is known and not known about three questions in comparative ethics: What are the ideas and concepts associated with moral thinking in normal Western adults? What are the processes resulting in a judgment that something is a vice or a virtue? Are those ideas, concepts, and processes available in different cultures and at different…

Children's increasing use of intentions and motives and decreasing use of outcomes to morally evaluate action are perhaps the most researched phenomena in moral cognition. However, relatively little is known about the acquisition of the ability to make moral evaluations and the processes involved. Based on the assumption that children's…

This paper reports attempts to alter children's moral judgments via short-term training of roletaking skills in order to assess the degree of relationship between moral reasoning and roletaking. In a three phase procedure, 40 first-grade children (20 males and 20 females) were assigned to one of four experimental groups (empathic, reciprocal,…

Investigates immanent justice decisions in 72 children at three grade levels (kindergarten, second, and fourth). The children were asked to evaluate behavior-accidental event sequences that represented all possible combinations of good or bad prior behavior followed by a lucky or unlucky event. (SS)

Comments on revision of Piagetian theory of reciprocity in forgiveness by Enright (PS 522 365) in this issue. Reviews relationship of Enright theory to previous research. Suggests that forgiveness may require moral insights in addition to reciprocity, but reciprocity appears central to children's and adults' understanding of forgiveness. Provides…

The performance of 75 congenitally blind and 75 sighted subjects (6- to 18-years-old) was compared on 32 Piagetian measures of reasoning, moral judgment, and moral conduct. Among major findings were that blind Ss did not achieve the reasoning processes characteristic of concrete operational thought with the facility or completion that would be…