Empathy and sympathy play crucial roles in much of human social interaction and are necessary components for healthy coexistence. Sympathy is thought to be a proxy for motivating prosocial behavior and providing the affective and motivational base for moral development. The purpose of the present study was to use functional MRI to characterize…

Major psychological theories of morality and motivation make the assumption that an inverse relationship exists between guilt and satisfaction. To the extent that feelings of guilt are linked to a particular motivational or moral stance, it is assumed that feelings of satisfaction are unlikely also be linked to that stance. Empirical findings in…

Articulates Kohlberg's position that moral understanding and moral reasoning provide motivation for moral action, contrasting it with traditional conceptions of motivation. (Author/BB)

A sample of 42 children, age 5 to 7, were tested for their ability to give appropriate causal accounts of incidents and to consider intentions and motives in judging the characters involved in these incidents. Results indicated that children are able to consider intention before they develop the ability to consider motives in moral judgment.…

In this study of the relationship between moral behavior, level of moral development, and motivation, moral behavior was assessed in an experimental situation in which it was necessary to violate the experimenter's authority to help someone; level of moral development was assessed by Kohlberg's Moral Judgment Scale, and motivation by a…

This article reviews recent investigations into intentionality (use of motive information) in young children's moral judgments. Intentionality has been shown to vary as a function of the vignette used to measure it. The educational implications of Piagetian theory and cognitive social learning theory for moral development are discussed.…

Identifies and explores educational issues related to Lawrence Kohlberg's work never systematically addressed by the author himself. Suggests that these issues could be developed into a contextualised theory of transformation. That theory could help make manifest Kohlberg's vision of a democratic school run by students and teachers. (MJP)