Children’s Moral Emotion Judgment And Attribution To The Person Falling To Act Prosocially In The Victimizing Context

Previous study on children’s moral emotion judgment and attribution mainly focus on three contexts and actors:the victimizer in the victimizing context, the person who act prosocially in the prosocial context, and the man who failed to act prosocially in the non-victimizing context. However, children’s moral emotion judgment and attribution about the person who failed to act prosocially in the victimizing context were never emphasized. This research primarily examined children’s moral emotion judgment and attribution to the person who failed to act prosocially (FAP) in the victimizing context.In experiment1, sixty8years old children were chose as subjects. By comparing with children’s performance in the non-victimizing context, we investigated that whether the intervention of victimizing context would change their moral emotion judgment and attribution to FAP significantly or not. As the result goes, the intervention of victimizing context did alter children’s moral emotion judgment to FAP. Comparing with the non-victimizing context, children were more inclined to judge FAP in victimizing context to feel unhappy.In experiment2, the development tendency of children’s judgment and attribution of moral emotion to FAP in the victimizing context was investigated, with thirty subjects in each age group(6/8/10-year-old). Meanwhile, we compared children’s judgment and attribution of moral emotion about victimizers and actors who failed to act prosocially. The results demonstrated that:(1) In the victimizing context, the development tendency of children’s moral emotion judgment and attribution to FAP was different from that to victimizer. With the increasing of their experience and ages, children’s ability to incorporate moral rules and moral emotion was enhanced too.8-year-old children’s performance of moral emotion judgment to victimizer have been very well and tended to be steady, while by the ages of10children’s emotion inference to FAP in this context were still to be improved.(2) For the same material and context, children were more likely to judge the FAP rather than the victimizer to feel unhappy, and their consideration of moral rules as well as the property of context and their empathy to the victim, all these three factors were demonstrated to contribute to the outcome together.(3)With regard to moral emotion attribution,10years old students would like to adopt moral orientation both to the FAP and victimizer, whereas the6years old young children tended to adopt moral orientation to the victimizer but other orientations such as the invalid answer to the FAP.