Research On Features Of Middle School Students' Judgment And Attribution Of Moral Emotion

The study on the judgment and attribution of moral emotion began since the end of the 1970s. On one hand, it had the succession of the earlier studies'characteristics, using stories of moral context which is relating to the real life of children, the researchers have tried to make out one's emotional experience of others, and the reason inference of the context, that is the attribution of moral emotion. Besides, the differences between this type of study and the earlier study is that the researchers didn't care about the level of children's moral judgment, but the reason of their emotion judgment, so as to find the emotional and affective motivation.The research on the judgment and attribution of moral emotion of children was focused on their definition, directional development, age differences, causes, influential factors and so on. But further explorations or researches of the expansion of the research object, the situation setting and the object improvement are still needed.Further analyses were focus on the limitations in the prior researches, the present study investigated the features of middle school students'moral emotion judgment and attribution in different context stories. We designed some stories which contain committing and prosocial context. The committing stories are of lying, stealing and body hurting by the actor's aggressive degree, they are all of matching-relationship of behavior intention and outcome. And the prosocial stories are of helping others, sharing and altruistic context by the payment of the helper. This research on 246 middle school students aged 14-16, explored the features of their judgment and attribution of moral emotion. We also made the contrastive analysis to their judgment to the others with the judgment to themselves. The main conclusions of this research are as follows:1. In both of committing and prosocial context, middle school students aged 14-16 can make the right moral judgment to the actor's behavior by their moral knowledge. Matching-relationship of behavior intention and outcome, the committing degree and the payment of helper can not affect the students'moral judgment.2. Middle school students can distinguish the matching-relationship of behavior intention and outcome, and they can make emotion judgments according this matching-relationship;At the same time, the committing degree in committing context and the payment of helper affect both of judgment and attribution of moral emotion of students aged 14.3. There exists differences between three aging block in all of two contexts, the differences are mainly found in 12 and 14 aged students, there was no significant difference between 14 and 16 aged students. That means the judgments of moral emotion of students above 14 become stable increasingly.4. The difference between the judgment of emotion of others and self in 14 and 16 aged students in committing context is because the standards they use when there exists different objects in their emotion judgment. There is no difference between the judgment of emotion of others and self in 14 and 16 aged students in prosocial context.