The ontogeny of children's social emotions in response to (un)fairness

Abstract

Humans have a deeply rooted sense of fairness, but its emotional foundation in early ontogeny remains poorly understood. Here, we asked if and when 4- to 10-year-old children show negative social emotions, such as shame or guilt, in response to advantageous unfairness expressed through a lowered body posture (measured using a Kinect depth sensor imaging camera). We found that older, but not younger children, showed more negative emotions, i.e. a reduced upper body posture, after unintentionally disadvantaging a peer on (4,1) trials than in response to fair (1,1) outcomes between themselves and others. Younger children, in contrast, expressed more negative emotions in response to the fair (1,1) split than in response to advantageous inequity. No systematic pattern of children's emotional responses was found in a non-social context, in which children divided resources between themselves and a non-social container. Supporting individual difference analyses showed that older children in the social context expressed negative emotions in response to advantageous inequity without directly acting on this negative emotional response by rejecting an advantageously unfair offer proposed by an experimenter at the end of the study. These findings shed new light on the emotional foundation of the human sense of fairness and suggest that children's negative emotional response to advantageous unfairness developmentally precedes their rejection of advantageously unfair resource distributions.

Children’s affective involvement in early word learning

“…Importantly, it is not children’s elevated posture per se that reflected positive emotions but rather the direction of the effects was such that positive outcomes, which are generally associated with positive emotions, resulted in elevated body posture. In contrast, negative events such as failing to achieve a goal 42 , 58 , receiving undeserving rewards 51 , 59 , or making unjustified requests for help 52 resulted in lowered body posture.…”

Taking a broader view of justice as a component of occupational health: Moving beyond organizational justice.

“…The research from both primatology and developmental psychology support an understanding of fairness not as a value, but as a biological adaptation. H. sapiens possess the homeostatic expectation to be treated fairly (Gerdemann et al, 2022;Bjorklund, 2020). The essence of this handbook chapter concerns the potential negative impact of (in)justice on worker health and safety.…”

The human fear paradox: Affective origins of cooperative care

“…The most systematic investigation to date of changes in children's body posture in the context of (un)fairness demonstrated that between 4 and 10 years of age, children's emotions expressed in response to receiving more of a reward than a peer (i.e., advantageously unequal outcomes) became more negative with increasing age. Conversely, children's emotions became more positive with age following equal distributions of resources (Gerdemann, McAuliffe, Blake, Haun, & Hepach, 2022a). Together, these findings suggest that emotions can regulate children's cooperative interactions although more research is needed to specify this relation.…”