Children's Judgment And Attribution Of Moral Emotion In Prosocial Contexts

This study consists of two experiments which were carried out through individual interviews. Experiment I involves two stories concerning neutral motives, which are common in children's everyday life. One is a matched story, ie: the outcome effects the intentional recipient, whereas the other is mismatch story, in which the outcome effects another unintentional recipient. And the children are asked to fulfill emotional judgment and attribution tasks. The purpose is to investigate whether children can understand the relations between outcome and intention in a neutral context. The results of this study show that all children aged from 4 to 10 can coordinate the outcome and intention information. Experiment II includes 3 prosocial contexts, which are about altruism, sharing things and helping others inspectively. And accordingly the loss of the actor decreases. As shown in experiment I the children have had the ability to coordinate the outcome and intention information in a neutral context. Therefore, the prosocial contexts also comprise such information. Children's tasks are to judge and attribute the actor's moral emotion, that is in order to investigate the principals of their judgment and attribution of moral emotion in prosocial contexts. The results as following: I. In prosocial contexts, most of the children are inclined to judge that the actor will experience positive emotions. 2. The children's attribution of the moral emotion will develop from a outcome orientation to a subjective one and then to a moral one. But in different prosocial contexts, the change of attribution takes place at different ages. 3. The difference in the types of prosocial contexts effects children's judgment and attribution of moral emotion. 4. The gender effects the children's attribution of moral emotion, and the reason remains to be studied.