We examined Canadian host-society children's prosociality (i.e., emotions and behaviors that reflect care for the welfare of others) toward refugee newcomer peers and the role of parental socialization (i.e., frequency of parent-child conversations about refugee newcomers) in children's refugee-specific prosociality. The sample included 168…

Why do some children feel happy about violating ethical norms whereas others feel guilty? This study examined whether children's attention to two types of competing cues during hypothetical transgressions related to their subsequent emotions. Eye tracking was used to test whether attending to other-oriented cues (i.e., a victim's face) versus…

Despite the well-established protective functions of guilt across childhood, its underlying physiological mechanisms have received little attention. We used latent difference scores (LDS) to model changes in children's (N = 267; 4- and 8-year-olds, 51% girls) skin conductance (SC) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) while they imagined…

Economically disadvantaged children often lack the resources to purchase popular goods and participate in their preferred social groups' activities, making it difficult to fit in. Meanwhile, children from middle socioeconomic status (SES) families may have additional influence over whether low SES children are included in such groups. We examined…

Previous research has shown that the majority of 8-year-old children share valuable resources equally with others, whereas 4-year-olds are more likely to favor themselves in their sharing allocations. In this study, we examine whether these patterns of sharing behavior are affected by the needs of the recipient or by the recipient's previous moral…

We investigated relations between children's moral judgments and moral emotions following disability-based exclusion and inclusive education, age, and contact intensity. Nine- and 12-year-old Swiss children (N = 351) from inclusive and noninclusive classrooms provided moral judgments and moral emotion attributions following six vignettes about…

This study investigated the role of moral emotions in the development of children's sharing behavior (N = 244 4-, 8-, and 12-year-old children). Children's sympathy was measured with both self- and primary caregiver-reports, and participants anticipated their negatively and positively valenced moral emotions (i.e., feeling guilty, sad, or bad; and…

The current study investigated developmental trajectories of teacher-reported aggressive behavior and whether these trajectories are associated with social-cognitive development (i.e., aggressive problem-solving) across the first three elementary grades in a large sample from Switzerland (N = 1,146). Semiparametric group-based analyses were…

The study investigated interpretive understanding, moral judgments, and emotion attributions in relation to social behaviour in a sample of 59 5-year-old, 123 7-year-old, and 130 9-year-old children. Interpretive understanding was assessed by two tasks measuring children's understanding of ambiguous situations. Moral judgments and emotion…