Moral disengagement (MD) refers to social-cognitive distortions that allow individuals to sidestep the self-regulatory processes that normally prevent immoral conduct. MD has been linked to bullying in childhood and adolescence, but most studies have used a cross-sectional design. Less is known about the longitudinal link. Therefore, the aim of…

Middle childhood seems to be crucial for the emergence of a moral identity, that is, an evaluative stance of how important it is for someone's sense of self to be moral. This study investigates the effects of moral identity on the neural processing of moral content in 10-year-old children. Participants were presented with scenes portraying…

Condemnation is ubiquitous in the social world and adults treat condemnation as a costly signal. We explore when children begin to treat condemnation as a signal by presenting 4- to 9-year-old children (N = 435) with stories involving a condemner of stealing and a noncondemner. Children were asked to predict who would be more likely to steal as…

Are moral judgement maturity and self-serving cognitive distortions or moral disengagement merely opposites, as recently claimed? Self-serving cognitive distortions and moral disengagement constitute (more or less interchangeable) neutralization techniques; they stem from the same theoretical background and refer to the same cognitive processes.…

Adults deliver mixed messages to children about the acceptability of truth- and lie-telling across contexts. To probe this discrepancy, we investigated how adults evaluate children's truths and lies across various situations. Participants watched videos of children telling prosocial lies or hurtful truths that varied in their directness (blunt or…

Research on the role of moral emotions in moral judgment, both in hypothetical dilemmas and in real-life moral decision making, has focused on preschool and elementary school age, with few studies spanning a larger age range, into adolescence and adulthood. The present special issue addresses a neglected area, the development of moral emotions and…

The development of children's lie-telling abilities is considered to be a social and cognitive milestone. While occasional lying is developmentally appropriate, the use of frequent, antisocial lies as a maladaptive problem-solving mechanism can indicate behaviour problems. Since lying is often considered a moral transgression, researchers should…

Psychological- and sociological-criminological research refers to, for example, cumulative risk factor models (e.g., Lösel & Bender, 2003) and Situational Action Theory (SAT; e.g., Wikström, 2006). The German longitudinal study "Chances and Risks in the Life Course" (research project A2, Collaborative Research Center 882; e.g.,…

Background: Although callous-unemotional (CU) traits have been associated with bullying among children and adolescents, relatively little is known about whether each of the three sub-constructs of CU traits--callous, uncaring, and unemotional--are associated with bullying when they are considered concurrently in the analysis. Objective: This study…

This study investigated the development of moral decision-making and moral emotion attributions in antisocial behavior and peer relationship dilemma scenarios. Participants were 540 school- and college-aged students, who were asked to explain their moral decision-making, subsequent emotions, and reasoning in regard to the scenarios. We combined…

The study investigated long-term relations between moral emotion attributions in childhood and adolescence and antisocial conduct in early adulthood while taking into account potentially confounding personality factors. Specifically, onset of prediction, unique and indirect effects of moral emotion attributions were examined. In a longitudinal…

This meta-analytic review of 42 studies covering 8,009 participants (ages 4-20) examines the relation of moral emotion attributions to prosocial and antisocial behavior. A significant association is found between moral emotion attributions and prosocial and antisocial behaviors ("d" = 0.26, 95% CI [0.15, 0.38]; "d" = 0.39, 95%…

We investigated whether children's robust conscience, formed during early family socialization, promotes their future adaptive and competent functioning in expanded ecologies. We assessed two dimensions of conscience in young children (N = 100) at 25, 38, and 52 months in scripted laboratory contexts: internalization of their mothers' and fathers'…

The developmental model of subjective group dynamics hypothesizes that peer exclusion during middle childhood involves inferences about group dynamics. To test the generality of this prediction, children judged, within minimal groups, peers whose behavior was loyal versus disloyal (Study 1: n = 46, mean age = 113 months) or morally acceptable…

The purpose of the study was to advance our understanding of the developmental precursors of Moral Disengagement (MD) and the role of MD in the development of antisocial behavior from early risk among an ethnically diverse sample of 187 low-income boys followed prospectively from ages 1.5 to 17. Results indicated associations between early…