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This study investigated children's (3-, 5-, and 7-year-olds) and adults' (total N = 92) integration of information about intentions, acts, and outcomes in moral judgments of psychological harm. Behavioral and emotional predictions and judgments of act acceptability and punishment were made under normal and noncanonical causal conditions. Participants at all ages judged it wrong to inflict negative psychological reactions of fear or embarrassment on unwilling participants, even when these reactions were idiosyncratic or noncanonical. When assigning punishment, younger children tended to use an outcome rule, whereas older participants were more likely to use an intention rule or a conjunction rule (if outcome is negative and intention is negative, then punish). The results show that children as young as 3 years are able to take into account other people's idiosyncratic perspectives when making moral judgments of psychological harm.

This study examined judgments and reasoning about four parental discipline practices (induction or reasoning and three practices involving “psychological control”; Barber, 1996; two forms of shaming and love withdrawal)among children (7–14 years of age) from urban and rural China and Canada (N = 288) in response to a moral transgression. Children from all settings critically evaluated love withdrawal and preferred induction. Despite being perceived as more common in China than in Canada, with age, parental discipline based on shaming or love withdrawal was increasingly negatively evaluated and believed to have detrimental effects on children’s feelings of self-worth and psychological well-being. Some cultural variations were found in evaluations of practices, perceptions of psychological harm, and attribution of parental goals.

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