Children’s moral self-concept relates to moral judgment, but not to arousal

Abstract

We investigated the relationships among the moral self-concept, arousal reactions to third-party moral situations, and moral judgment in 5- to 7-year-old children (N = 59). Children’s moral self-concept was assessed using a puppet task. In addition, children were shown audiovisual scenes depicting prosocial, antisocial, and neutral interactions between children. We measured phasic pupil dilation responses to the actions and collected children’s judgments of the actions. The results show that children judged antisocial behavior as more negative and prosocial behavior as more positive than neutral behavior. In addition, children showed significantly higher arousal when observing antisocial behavior compared with neutral and prosocial behavior. Moreover, children’s moral judgment related to their arousal: the more negative the moral judgment, the higher the arousal, even in prosocial and neutral scenarios. Finally, children’s moral self-concept correlated with their explicit judgments, but not with their physiological arousal. These results support developmental theories suggesting a relationship between the moral self and moral judgment.