Neural processing of moral content reflects moral identity in 10-year-old children

Children's Neural Processing of the Misfortunes and Fortunes of Prosocial and Antisocial Individuals

Behavioral studies have found that children are less likely to share the feelings of antisocial individuals than those of prosocial individuals. However, the underlying neural mechanism remains unclear. To address this gap, the current study utilized electroencephalogram (EEG) to examine the neural responses of 4- to 12-year-old children to the misfortunes and fortunes of prosocial and antisocial individuals (N = 73). When observing the experiences of prosocial individuals, children exhibited a greater amplitude of parietal P3, an indicator of top-down allocated attention, to misfortunes compared to fortunes. This difference disappeared when observing the experiences of antisocial individuals. Additionally, children displayed stronger mu suppression, indicating neural mirroring, toward prosocial individuals than antisocial individuals while observing their experiences. The current findings suggest that children allocate more attention resources to the experiences, especially misfortunes, of prosocial individuals than antisocial individuals. These findings deepened our understanding of how children react to others' experiences based on others' moral behaviors from a neural perspective.

Preschoolers' cognitive skills predict their developing moral self

Although individual differences in children's moral self-concept emerge during early childhood and predict future behavioral outcomes, the cognitive skills underlying the development of the moral self have received little attention. We addressed this gap with a longitudinal sample of 106 children (Mage = 52.78 months, SD = 6.61, range = 37-64 at Time 1) living in urban economic deprivation. In the fall, children completed interviews on the moral self as well as hot and cool executive function (EF) tasks, a five-task theory of mind (ToM) battery, and a receptive verbal assessment. Approximately 6 months later, children again completed the moral self interview. Results from a series of latent change score models, controlling for age and parents' education, demonstrate that different aspects of the moral self were supported in different ways, and at different times, by aspects of cognition. For instance, the aggressive moral self was initially predicted by both cool and hot EF, whereas change was predicted by cool EF. In comparison, the socioemotional moral self was initially predicted by cool EF, as were changes over time. The initial instrumental helping moral self was predicted by ToM. Findings suggest that a multidimensional moral self may be best enhanced by a multipronged approach to cognitive support.

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

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.

Moral content influences facial emotion processing development during early-to-middle childhood

Facial emotions are often processed in light of moral information, which can assist in predicting and interpreting the intentions of another. Neurophysiological measures of facial emotion processing (FEP) may be sensitive to moral content. Relatively little is known, however, about the relationship between moral content and FEP during early-to-middle childhood, and how this relationship may change across development. Eighty-four children aged 4-12 years completed a task assessing whether child faces primed within the moral harm/care domain influenced face sensitive event-related potentials (ERPs; N170 and LPP). Results demonstrated that N170 amplitude decreased with age for faces primed with positive moral content, whilst LPP amplitude decreased with age for faces primed with negative moral content. Collectively, this suggests that morally relevant content within the harm/care domain is integrated during the early stages of FEP in early-to-middle childhood. Moreover, stronger language ability was positively correlated with the LPP for fearful faces primed with negative moral content. Overall, findings provide novel evidence to suggest that FEP development may be modulated by moral content, and emotion-specific results may be influenced by language. Findings from this research highlight the complex relationship between broader social cognitive skills during child development.