How Children Cognitively Process and Emotionally Respond to Victimizing Others: A Multimethod Developmental Approach

After violating ethical norms, such as stealing, why do some children feel positively-valenced, selfish emotions while others feel negatively-valenced, kind emotions? Psychologists have argued that, while victimizing others, how people cognitively process environmental cues related to conflicting selfish and other-oriented concerns influences how they emotionally respond. Yet, no studies have examined these assertions during childhood, when kind emotions develop most. In this dissertation, I tested these assertions using multiple methods and study designs with samples of 4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds. In Study 1, I used eye tracking and found that, across age groups, attentional tendencies (calculated as the percentage of time children visually attended to other-oriented minus self-serving cues) positively and negatively related to kind and selfish emotions, respectively. In Study 2, I incorporated facial expression recognition technology to examine how concurrent measures of attentional tendencies and sad facial expressions related to each other, as well as kind and selfish emotions. I found that attentional tendencies better predicted sad facial expressions than vice versa, but that only sad facial expressions were directly related to kind and selfish emotions. In Study 3, I experimentally tested three techniques for promoting children’s cognitive processing of other-oriented cues, with the goal of enhancing their kind emotions. In the other-focused and self-focused role-taking conditions, children were instructed to think about, respectively, how the victim would feel and how they would feel if they were the victim during each transgression. In the orienting condition, children were only drawn to attend to the victim’s face via an animation. The results revealed that children in the orienting condition reported the most kind emotions and significantly more than the other-focused, but not the self-focused, condition. Overall, this dissertation points to the impact of children’s cognitive processing on their emotional responding during ethical transgressions. In doing so, it offers new insights for theory and the practice of parents, teachers, and interventionists.Ph.D