The current study examined relations between distinct aspects of moral functioning, and their cognitive and emotional correlates, in preschool age children. Participants were 171 typically developing 3- to 6-year-olds. Each child completed several tasks, including (a) moral tasks assessing both performance of various moral actions and evaluations…

This study used short-term longitudinal data to examine the contributions of democratic teaching practices (e.g., the Developmental Designs approach) and equitable school climate to civic engagement attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors among 515 Black and Latino middle school students (47.9% male). Concurrent experiences of democratic homeroom and…

This meta-analytic review of 42 studies covering 8,009 participants (ages 4-20) examines the relation of moral emotion attributions to prosocial and antisocial behavior. A significant association is found between moral emotion attributions and prosocial and antisocial behaviors ("d" = 0.26, 95% CI [0.15, 0.38]; "d" = 0.39, 95%…

This longitudinal study examined how school belonging changes over the years of high school, and how it is associated with academic achievement and motivation. Students from Latin American, Asian, and European backgrounds participated ("N" = 572; age span = 13.94-19.15 years). In ninth grade, girls' school belonging was higher than…

Judgments and justifications for different forms of civic involvement and their associations with organized and civic behavior were examined in 312 middle-class primarily White adolescents (M = 17.01 years). Adolescents applied moral, conventional, and personal criteria to distinguish involvement in community service, standard political, social…

This study examined the relation of language to the development of a cultural self. Bilingual children ages 8-14 from Hong Kong (N = 125) were interviewed in either English or Chinese. They recalled autobiographical events and described themselves, and indicated their agreement with Chinese interdependent versus Western independent values.…

Two studies investigated the role of children's moral motivation and sympathy in prosocial behavior. Study 1 measured other-reported prosocial behavior and self- and other-reported sympathy. Moral motivation was assessed by emotion attributions and moral reasoning following hypothetical transgressions in a representative longitudinal sample of…

This study tested the hypothesis that values, abstract goals serving as guiding life principles, become relatively important predictors of adolescents' self-reported violent behavior in school environments in which violence is relatively common. The study employed a students-nested-in-schools design. Arab and Jewish adolescents (N = 907, M age =…