This study examined the development of sharing and its associations with moral emotions in an ethnically diverse sample of 244 4-, 8-, and 12-year-old children. Sharing was measured through participants’ allocation of resources in the dictator game. Participants completed self-report measures of sympathy and anticipated their negatively and positively valenced moral emotions (i.e., guilt and pride) following actions that either violated or upheld moral norms. Results demonstrated an age-related increase in sharing between ages 4 and 8. For children with low levels of sympathy, sharing was predicted by negatively valenced moral emotions following the failure to perform prosocial duties. Sympathy also emerged as a significant predictor of sharing behaviour in early childhood. The implications of these results are discussed in relation to children’s developing norms of fairness and the emergence of two compensatory emotional pathways to altruistic sharing, one via sympathy and one via negatively valenced moral emotions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/35133 |
| Date | 19 March 2013 |
| Creators | Ongley, Sophia Francis |
| Contributors | Malti, Tina, Grusec, Joan |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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