The Development Of Children's Indebtedness And Its' Contribution To Peer Relationships

Morality is an important cornerstone of better life,national unity,social harmony and human survival.Understanding children's moral development,especially the development of moral emotions,not only contributes to the explanation and prediction of communal relationship building in moral interactions,but also helps to establish an appropriate system for children's moral education from a mechanism level.Receiving favors and responding with reciprocity are crucial for children to build peer relationships,with social emotions function as important catalyzers underlying these processes.Researches on adults have demonstrated that the beneficiary is likely to experience a positive feeling of gratitude when favors are believed to be altruistic or communal(e.g.,caring for the beneficiary),but may feel guilty for burdening the benefactor as well.Gratitude and guilt,as we mentioned above,motivate the beneficiary's reciprocal behaviors which reflect care and concerns thus reinforce the communal relationship with the benefactor.In contrast,when the benefactor's intentions are perceived to be exchange-oriented or even duplicitous(e.g.,help in order to exchange repayment)instead of guilty and grateful,the beneficiary is more likely to feel a sense of obligation to repay.Sense of obligation is a negative emotion driven by the pressure in compliance to the norm of reciprocity,which motivates reciprocity and contributes to relationships of exchange with the benefactor,just like business relations.Both guilt and the sense of obligation contribute to the negative feeling of indebtedness in favor receiving contexts among adults.During the interaction of giving and repaying favors,mid-childhood children whose moral emotions are developing will experience not only gratitude but also indebtedness.Meanwhile,children's peer relationships in mid-childhood witness a shift from exchange-oriented to community-based stage:while early mid-childhood children tend to build friendships with exchange-oriented benefactors,who offer favors and expect repayment based on equality,late midchildhood children prefer to build friendships with communal benefactors,who provide care and favors voluntarily without any requirement for repayment.However,the function of indebtedness underlying this shift is still unclear.Few studies have explored the development of children's indebtedness while some limitations still exist in:(1)distinguishing guilt and obligation components in children's indebtedness;(2)systematically investigating the influence of children's indebtedness from appraisals,emotions and behaviors aspects with the script-based paradigms.Here,we integrated diverse methods such as the story-based questionnaire,interview sampling,the interpersonal interactive game and the longitudinal follow-up to systematically investigate the relationships between appraisals of intentions,emotional experiences,behaviors and social adaptations regarding receiving help.We aimed to answer:(1)Whether intentions of benefactors influence children's rejection of help in mid-childhood?(2)Whether indebtedness of mid-childhood children includes guilt and obligation?(3)How do mid-childhood children evaluate intentions of benefactors and experience the two components of indebtedness?(4)How do the two components of indebtedness influence mid-childhood children's behaviors and buildings of peer relationships?In Study 1(Experiment 1),using story-based questionnaire and interview sampling,we collected mid-childhood children's choices of whether to reject help from altruistic benefactors(help with no expectation of repayments)and strategic ones(help with expectation of repayments)as well as their explanations of choice reasons in order to explore the development of children's indebtedness in mid-childhood.Two aspects of evidence demonstrated that mid-childhood children have experienced the feeling of indebtedness,in which it was influenced by intentions of benefactors.Firstly,the help rejection behavior among mid-childhood participants has been observed and regarded as a proper index of indebtedness.Moreover,the rate of help rejection from strategic benefactors was higher than that from altruistic ones.Secondly,when participants rejected benefactors' help,their main reasons included reciprocal norms which motivate individuals' obligation to repay,and altruistic norms which motivate guilt.Besides some indebtedness-like negative words(e.g.,indebtedness,guilt and sadness)were children's main explanations of rejection.In Study 2(Experiment 2 & 3),we manipulated the benefactors' strategic and altruistic intentions in a multi-round interpersonal interactive game to induce the two components of indebtedness and systematically investigate relations between appraisals of benefactors' intentions,the emotional experiences and behavioral tendency when mid-childhood children receiving helps.Deciders and Receivers were two roles in the interactive game.In each round of the game,participants(Receivers)would listen to a 10-second noise of baby crying and the co-players(Deciders)could spend some of their initial candy tokens(10 candies)helping participants reduce the duration of noise.We manipulated the co-players' intention of help by informing that each co-player could tell participants whether they need repayment or not after the help.While some co-players might need repayment after help other co-players might not.This information would be presented on the screen at the beginning of each round.Then participants guessed whether the co-players needed them to repay and how many candies the co-players expected them to repay.After the first three blocks of the game(free-choice block;18 trials),participants were required to decide whether or not to accept the help.This binary choice was used to figure out the effect of anticipatory emotions in participants' help rejection.In the fourth block(forced-choice block;6trials),participants had to accept the co-player's help.No matter what kind of block it was,at the end of each round,participants received 15 candies and could decide how many they wanted to allocate to the co-player(i.e.,allocation period).Participants were informed that they could spend their candies obtaining gifts that they wanted.The amount of candies allocated to the co-players in the forced-choice block was used as an index of reciprocity.This default setting in the fourth block aimed at avoiding the missing of reciprocity if participants rejected all helps in the first three blocks.To make the experiment more authentic and interesting,we varied the number of candies that each co-player decided to spend to help the participant(co-player's cost: 2,5 or 8candies).After that,the pictures representing all types of co-players(the six intentioncost combinations)were presented again.The participant recalled their perceived care,gratitude,indebtedness,guilt,obligation and the willingness to be friends after receiving the co-player's help and before the allocation period and made the emotional ratings for all six kinds of trials.The order of pictures and ratings were completely randomly arranged.Using the interactive game,we investigated the relations between benefactors' intentions,indebtedness and reciprocity and buildings of relationships.To exclude the possibility that children had limited ability of recalling and rating their feelings in post-experiment ratings and validate the robustness of our findings in Experiment 2,we conducted Experiment 3 by recruiting an independent sample from a kindergarten and a primary school different from Experiment 2.The procedure in Experiment 3 was similar as Experiment 2,except that participants rated their feelings of gratitude,indebtedness,guilt,sense of obligation,perceived care,to what extent they liked the co-player online in each round of the interactive game before the choice of rejecting or accepting help,with the order of ratings countered-balanced across rounds.After the ratings,participants continued to decide whether they wanted to accept this co-player's help and how many candies they would allocate to this co-player from their own candy accounts in this round.Given the multiple ratings in each round largely extended the duration of each round,the interactive game in Experiment 3 consisted of6 trials in total,corresponding to the six co-player's intention-cost combinations and were divided into two blocks.Experiment 2 and 3 consistently validated that both the guilt for burdening the benefactor and the sense of obligation to repay contributed to participants' self-reported indebtedness.As age increased,the magnitude of guilt and its contribution to indebtedness increased;while the sense of obligation and its contribution to indebtedness decreased.More importantly,two experiments provided replicable evidence,suggesting that the developments of guilt and obligation components of indebtedness in the aspects of appraisals,emotions and behaviors are crucial mechanisms underlying the development of children's peer relationships during midchildhood.Specifically,in the appraisals and emotions aspects,the appraisal on benefactor's altruistic intention(i.e.,the perceived care from help)contributed to the developments of the two components of indebtedness.The appraisal of perceived care from help positively predicted participants' guilt ratings while the appraisal of benefactors' expectation for repayments positively predicted participants' obligation ratings.As age increased,the appraisal of perceived care from help increasingly contributed to the guilt ratings and decreasingly contributed to the obligation ratings.In the emotions and behaviors aspects,two components of indebtedness contributed to the building of friendships.Guilt ratings increasingly contributed to the tendency to build friendship with the benefactor and obligation ratings decreasingly contributed to the tendency of building friendship with the benefactor with age increasing.The appraisal-emotion-behavior associations were verified by the structural equation model analysis,which indicated participants' increased tendencies to build friendships with benefactors who were perceived to care about participants' welfare and bring them feelings of guilt(i.e.,communal relationship)rather than those who help with the expectation of repayments and bring them the obligation to repay(i.e.,exchange relationship).In Study 3(The Longitudinal Study),we aimed at expanding the function of indebtedness on peer relationships to mid-childhood children's school life.Participants who were at the age of guilt and obligation components separating(i.e.,from 8 to 10 years old)in Experiment 3 were followed up in the longitudinal study.We used the peer-nomination method(three best friends)to collect their social networks information in two semesters in order to investigate the relations between two components of indebtedness and peer relationships among mid-childhood children.Results revealed that those participants whose tendency to build friendships were more influenced by guilt,and their positions in their social networks were more important.Specifically,the contribution of guilt on the tendency to build friendships positively moderated the changes of participants' degree centrality in the social network,while the contribution of obligation on the tendency to build friendships,contributions of guilt and obligation to indebtedness,guilt and obligation ratings showed no significant effect in the changes of participants' degree centrality in the social networks.In sum,we integrated diverse methods such as the story-based questionnaire and interview sampling,the interpersonal interactive game and the longitudinal follow-up to systematically investigate the negative indebtedness from appraisals,emotions and behaviors,especially its functions of peer relationships.Theoretically,on the one hand,our findings expand the theory of indebtedness among children and provide foundations for the establishment of proper education and intervention system of indebtedness.Meanwhile,our studies enrich the systematical understanding of moral developments among children and build the methodological bases for its future applications in understanding the developments of social emotions.In practice,our findings about children's indebtedness in moral interactions provide suggestions for understanding and cultivating children's morality.