4-8-year-old children's attributions of emotion to a story figure who violated a moral rule were studied in a series of experiments. Most 4-year-olds judged a wrongdoer to experience positive emotions, focusing their justifications on the successful outcome of his action, whereas almost all 8-year-olds attributed negative feelings, focusing on the moral value of the wrongdoer's action. A developmental trend from outcome-oriented toward morally oriented emotion attributions was also observed in children's judgments of the feelings of a story character who had resisted temptation. When morally evaluating a wrongdoer, only children above the age of 6 years took emotional reactions into account, judging a "happy" wrongdoer to be worse than a "sorry" one. 4- and 5-year-olds attributed positive emotions to a wrongdoer even if his transgression was severe and if he did not gain any material profit from it. However, they did not expect a person (even an ill-motivated one) to feel good if he or she unintentionally harmed another person or merely observed someone being hurt. These results are discussed in relation to recent research on children's developing conceptions of emotion and on the early development of moral understanding.
We investigated autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children's ability to deceive or obstruct an opponent. When required to tell a lie (saying that a box was locked) autistic children performed significantly worse than their controls, taking into account mental age. However, they readily prevented a competitor from gaining a reward by physical manipulation (locking a box). Their success on sabotage demonstrated that their failure on deception was not due to an inability to understand the task. Performance on deception was predicted by performance on a false belief attribution task. The present findings confirm that autistic children have a specific deficit in understanding and manipulating beliefs.
An implicit understanding of false belief indicated by anticipatory looking has been shown to be significantly correlated with performance on explicit false-belief tasks in 3- and 4-year-old children (Low, 2010). Recent evidence from infant research indicates, however, that implicit false-belief understanding guides infants' expectations about goal-directed actions even in the second year of life. The present study presents data from a sample of N= 70 infants who were tested longitudinally at 15, 18, 30, 36 and 48 months with implicit and explicit Theory of Mind measures, as well as an assessment of verbal IQ. Belief-based anticipatory looking in the false-belief task at 18 months significantly predicted verbal false-belief reasoning at 48 months, after controlling for verbal IQ. These findings indicate developmental continuity and conceptual specificity in belief reasoning from infancy to preschool age. They are discussed with respect to competing accounts of infants' understanding of the mind.
4-8-year-old children's attributions of emotion to a story figure who violated a moral rule were studied in a series of experiments. Most 4-year-olds judged a wrongdoer to experience positive emotions, focusing their justifications on the successful outcome of his action, whereas almost all 8-year-olds attributed negative feelings, focusing on the moral value of the wrongdoer's action. A developmental trend from outcome-oriented toward morally oriented emotion attributions was also observed in children's judgments of the feelings of a story character who had resisted temptation. When morally evaluating a wrongdoer, only children above the age of 6 years took emotional reactions into account, judging a "happy" wrongdoer to be worse than a "sorry" one. 4- and 5-year-olds attributed positive emotions to a wrongdoer even if his transgression was severe and if he did not gain any material profit from it. However, they did not expect a person (even an ill-motivated one) to feel good if he or she unintentionally harmed another person or merely observed someone being hurt. These results are discussed in relation to recent research on children's developing conceptions of emotion and on the early development of moral understanding.
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