This study examined whether, for bullying perpetrators, admitting to their behavior was associated with specific psychosocial characteristics, and whether it predicted decreases in bullying behavior and a higher responsiveness to a successful anti-bullying program after 9 months of implementation. It also investigated whether participation in an…

The current study aimed to investigate the cultural differences in the developmental origins of children's intent-based moral judgment and moral behavior in the context of indirect reciprocity. To this end, we compared how German and Chinese children interpret and react to antisocial and prosocial interactions between puppets. An actor puppet…

This article embeds the study of character development within the two-decades-long research program framed by the Lerner and Lerner model of positive youth development. Character development involves attaining the feelings, thoughts, and skills needed to act coherently across time and place to serve self and others in mutually beneficial, positive…

Experiencing the moral emotions of gratitude and moral elevation are responses to witnessing virtuous deeds of others. Both emotions have been found to share similar features and behavioral consequences, including the stimulation of personal development. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions indicates that gratitude and elevation…

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…

Developmental scholars assert that parents are important in fostering prosocial behaviors in adolescents, but longitudinal investigations on this topic are limited. Participants consisted of 372 boys and 358 girls with a mean age of 10.84 years (SD = 1.57) at Wave 1 from a mostly middle class community in Spain. Across three successive years,…

Children at three levels of conceptual maturity were presented with six dilemmas in order to test the hypothesis that cognitive development predicts concrete behavioral choices whenever individuals are at least as complex as the moral alternatives confronting them. (Author/DB)

Investigated six- to nine-year-old children's understanding of the principle of mutual trust by testing children's ability to make correct blame attributions on the basis of second-order beliefs. Subjects were presented with four story frames. Stories differed in protagonist's second-order belief about another's knowledge. (Author/NH)

Replicates and extends to older adolescents previous findings of factorial independence between IQ and daydreaming in both gifted and average children and young adolescents. Also aims to relate to the development of moral reasoning ability research findings of a decline in guilt and fear-of-failure daydreams among children, adolescents, and…

Examines the validity of the preconventional level of moral reasoning as conceptualized by Kohlberg in 8 subjects of 10-15 years. Results showed that a substantial number of arguments could not be matched to criterion judgments in the standard scoring manual. (RJC)

Examines Rasmussen's Ego Identity Scale for internal consistency reliability and construct validity. Subjects included 114 primarily White and middle-class seventh- and twelfth-grade students. Implications for identity assessment are drawn. (Author/RH)

Upper-middle-class and working-class children (N=249) were sampled to examine the relationship between maternal disciplinary practices and the development of moral judgment. Results indicated only upper-middle-class girls' moral development was significantly correlated with maternal disciplinary practices. (Author/DB)

Describes the equity and cognitive developmental theories of children's concepts of distributive justice and examines a methodological problem which may have influenced previous findings. Also reports a study of the relations between hypothetical arguments, real-life arguments, and real-life division behaviors of 84 children aged four to seven…

The present study investigates whether epistemic cognition in moral domain (dubbed "metaethical cognition") develops analogously to epistemic reasoning regarding empirical knowledge. The study's conceptual framework distinguishes two main areas of metaethical cognition (beliefs about the nature of moral judgments and conceptions of the process of…

Pairs of elementary school children at different concept development levels were given problems to discuss, in order to examine the prediction, derived from the equilibration model, that when two children holding different beliefs must arrive at a consenus, the child possessing the higher level of cognitive development will prevail over the child…