The emergence of moral emotions such as guilt is central in moral and prosocial development. Guilt is an important psychological factor, which motivates prosocial behaviour and is credited for multiple social functions. Importantly, it remains unclear what determines the extent to which children show guilt. The current study examined two factors…

Although the influence of intent understanding on children's moral development has been long studied, little research has examined the influence of belief understanding on that development. In two studies we presented children with morally relevant belief vignettes to examine the extent to which they incorporate both intent and belief information…

In order to extend research on children's Theory of Mind (ToM) within moral development, researchers have proposed a novel area of research, Morally Relevant ToM. It has been argued to better account for the moral and social considerations that children are required to make when using their ToM abilities in real life situations. To further the…

Moral reasoning and theory of mind (ToM) are two distinct but related aspects of social cognition. While past research has clearly documented serious delays in ToM development for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) both cross-sectionally (e.g. Happe, 1995) and longitudinally (Peterson & Wellman, 2020) much less is known about the…

The relation between children's guilt proneness and theory of mind (???) was examined in children (? = 96) aged 7- to 11-years. Guilt proneness was assessed with a self-report scenario-based measure and ToM was examined with a battery of first-order and second-order mental-state tasks. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that second-order,…

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…