Moral disengagement is a cognitive mechanism that seeks to avoid the feeling of guilt in the face of transgressive behaviors and seems to be present in behaviors such as cyberbullying, cybergossip or bullying in adolescence. Few studies have explored this connection in the primary school years, even though gossip, bullying and cyberbullying are…

Although sports are popular activities for adolescents, the emphasis on winning at all costs, prevalent in adult competition models, might hinder moral development in youth. Therefore, this article reports the results of two studies investigating adolescent attitudes toward the acceptance of sports aggression from an integrated theoretical…

Promoting gender respect is essential to the development of both sexes and to gender equality. This article argues for the importance of moral education to support the struggle of girls and women to achieve respect within unequal and complex gender power relations, especially in poverty contexts. Evidence collected from a sequence of in-depth…

The aim of this study was to compare the way in which 216 young handball players ("Mage" = 12.79, SD = 2.20) of different ages (nine- to 10-years-old, 11- to 12-years-old, 13- to 14-years-old, and 15- to 16-years-old) combined and integrated five different information cues (the consequences of the aggression, the current score, the time…

Despite the fact that lie-telling is a common concern among parents, clinicians, and professionals, there has been little systematic investigation of the lies that children tell in relation to their problematic behaviors, nor of other social factors that may influence this relation. This study explored the relation between children's problem…

This study examined the role of aggressiveness and parenting in the development of children's moral self-concept. Participants were 198 elementary school children and their parents (M = 8.65 years, SD = 2.44). Participants completed a structured moral self puppet interview and a questionnaire about their relationship to parents. Parents completed…

The present study investigated the longitudinal association between the development of bullying (traditional bullying and cyberbullying) and the development of moral deficiencies (moral disengagement, low moral responsibility, and weak feelings of remorse) during adolescence. A total of 960 Swiss adolescents completed an electronic questionnaire…

This study investigated differences in children's and adolescents' experiences of harming their siblings and friends. Participants ("N" = 101; 7-, 11-, and 16-year-olds) provided accounts of events when they hurt a younger sibling and a friend. Harm against friends was described as unusual, unforeseeable, and circumstantial. By contrast,…

The value of athletics in character development has been anecdotally touted for centuries, but the reality is that sporting environments have regularly failed to achieve the potentials of moral education. The shared physical and mental demands of sports combined with the intensity with which much of society approaches competition makes the playing…

Friends' moral characteristics such as their moral reasoning represent an important social contextual factor for children's behavioral socialization. Guided by this assumption, we compared the effects of children's and friends' moral reasoning on their aggressive behavior in a low-risk sample of elementary school children. Peer nominations and…

The purposes of this study were to conceptualize moral identity as moral ideal self, to develop a measure of this construct, to test for age and gender differences, to examine links between moral ideal self and adolescent outcomes, and to assess purpose and social responsibility as mediators of the relations between moral ideal self and outcomes.…

There is a need for proactive support and early intervention to meet the needs of behaviorally at-risk students. There is limited opportunity to intervene with effective results, given that stability of antisocial behavior increases dramatically over time. Moreover, if antisocial behavior patterns are not addressed early on, these children tend to…

This study compared the moral development of solo juvenile male sex offenders (n = 20) and juvenile male non-offenders (n = 76), aged 13-19 years, from lower socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. The Moral Orientation Measure (MOM) was used to assess punishment- and victim-based moral orientation in sexual and non-sexual situations. Moral…

Reports on a study of moral judgments in aggressive and nonaggressive children. Assessed moral judgment by presenting the children with stories of moral conflict in everyday life using peer rating. Results showed significant differences according to gender and no constant level of moral reasoning was measured in either aggressive or nonaggressive…

Presents a theoretical perspective for the psychological study of moral development which does not rely on the notion that different types of moral view have different logical structures and which provides a framework for specific predictions about moral content and moral reasoning, motivation, and behavior. (Author/RH)