The systematic literature review is based on a critical need in the area of values, where there are many uncertainties around universal definitions and drivers of values and traits. The study evaluated definitions, categories, drivers and the interdependence between values and personality traits and behaviours. Over 5,873 studies over a 70-year…

Values serve as guiding principles, motivating specific behaviors, and actions. Peers spend a considerable amount of time together, thus offering a unique platform for the acquisition and development of values. During adolescence, a stage of life when youth are actively defining their identities, peers emerge as vital social agents, contributing…

Amid the rapid development of higher education in China and the increasingly fierce competition among colleges, improving teachers' job satisfaction has become a critical criterion for ensuring the sustainable development of newly established undergraduate institutions and meeting the growing demand for talent cultivation. In this study I explores…

Children show less positivity toward gender-nonconforming (GN) than gender-conforming (GC) peers. Yet, little is known about children's reasoning about peers of varying gender expressions, including age-, gender-, and culture-related influences. We investigated how children aged 4- to 5- and 8- to 9-years-old in Hong Kong and Canada (N = 678)…

Turnover in the US early childhood education (ECE) workforce is associated with worse outcomes for children. Greater workplace spirituality, or the perception of meaningful work, sense of community, and alignment with organizational values, is associated with reduced turnover. However, this association has not been examined in ECE professionals.…

Introduction: The Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) identifies innate moral foundations that drive moral judgment, and are assumed to mature at different phases throughout development. However, core developmental aspects of moral foundations, such as normative age and gender differences from an MFT perspective, remain relatively unexplored,…

Background: A growing body of research shows that the beliefs we hold about the nature of knowing and knowledge (epistemic beliefs) may mediate moral reasoning. However, a limitation of much of the research in the area of epistemic beliefs is the lack of a longitudinal approach. Aims: The study investigated longitudinal changes in Australian…

In industrialized societies, adults exhibit stable preferences for the types of people, animals, and entities they feel moral concern for (Crimston et al., 2016). Only one published study to date has utilized the moral circles paradigm to examine these preferences in children, finding that as children age, their preferences shift to become more…

A growth mixture modeling (GMM) analysis of neutralization scores in 1,830 youth across six waves of data revealed evidence of a three-class model in which moral neutralization either increased (low accelerating), decreased (high decelerating), or remained the same (moderate stable) over time. Controlling for age, sex, race, group assignment, and…

Understanding distinctions between morality and conventions is an important milestone in children's moral development. The current meta-analysis integrated decades of social domain theory research (Smetana, 2006; Turiel, 1983) on moral and conventional judgments from early to middle childhood. We examined 95 effect sizes from 18 studies (2,707…

Widespread academic dishonesty among higher education (HE) students has been a concern for higher education institutes (HEIs). Ethics literature reports that unintentional plagiarism is more prevalent among HE students and the root cause is, limited or no awareness of nuances of ethics concerning plagiarism resulting in poor ethical judgments.…

Young children robustly distinguish between moral norms and conventional norms (Smetana, 1984; Yucel et al., 2020). In existing research, norms about the fair distribution of resources are by definition considered part of the moral domain; they are not distinguished from other moral norms such as those involving physical harm. Yet an understanding…

Research Findings: Children's capacities for complex socio-moral reasoning carries across domains; similarly, children's aggressive behaviors changes as a function of context. However, with a few exceptions, little research has considered children's socio-moral reasoning and aggressive subtypes in concert. The goals of the current study were to…

Although there is a body of literature that addresses victimization of adolescents based on their membership in stigmatized groups, there is little that focuses on this type of aggression delivered digitally. Furthermore, the extant literature typically focuses on the targets of such aggression, but scant attention has been paid to the aggressors.…

This research study was conducted to determine what motivational factors influenced female and minority students to pursue a career in healthcare. Using Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, this quantitative study suggested that there are three distinct motivational factors influencing female and minority students to pursue a healthcare as their…