“There are no band-aids for emotions”: The development of thinking about emotional harm.

Abstract

An understanding of harm is central to social and cognitive development, but harm largely has been conceptualized as physical damage or injury. Less research focuses on children's judgments of harm to others' internal well-being (emotional harms). We asked 5-10-year-old children (N = 456, 50% girls, 50% boys; primarily tested in Central New York, with socioeconomic diversity, but limited racial/ethnic or linguistic diversity) to compare emotional and physical harms. In Experiment 1, children compared simple harms (intended and completed) and then scenarios in which the perpetrator's intention did not match the outcome (intended emotional harm, but caused physical harm, or vice-versa). Assessments of the severity of emotional (versus physical) harm increased with age and depended on the perpetrator's intentions. In Experiment 2, children saw emotional and physical harms that were: Simple (intended and completed); Incomplete (intended, but not completed); or Accidental (not intended, but completed). Children evaluated physical and emotional harms in isolation and then compared the two. Judgments of the relative severity of emotional harm increased with age, but only when intentions and outcomes were both present. This reflected an increase with age in children's perceptions that emotional harm was hurtful, whereas perceptions of physical harm were relatively stable across development. With age, children also increasingly associated emotional harms with longer-term impacts (being remembered and reoccurring). These findings suggest reasoning about the severity, underlying intentions, and duration of emotional harm shifts with age. The results hold implications for moral development, law and psychology, and emotional-harm-related interventions including those addressing bullying.

The Physical-Emotional Distinction in Tort

“…At least two research teams in developmental psychology have reported that the capacity to perceive emotional harm as morally wrong requires more ontogenetic development than does the capacity to perceive physical harm as morally wrong. 33 This reported finding means that young children develop the ability to encode physical harm (e.g., 'Mary hit William') as morally wrong before they develop the ability to encode emotional harm (e.g., 'Mary humiliated William') in this way. A corollary of this finding is that it is cognitively easier for people-including adults-to perceive physical harm (relative to emotional harm) as requiring redress, even where the difference in cognitive difficulty is small.…”