Novel Developmental Perspectives on the Link Between Morality and Social Outcomes

Research on moral development has a long tradition across a number of disciplines. A critical issue in understanding how children and adolescents become socially responsible individuals concerns the connections between moral processes and socio-behavioral outcomes. Morality can be conceived as the ability to decide about rightness or wrongness in situations involving a person’s well-being, to think about justice and right and to regulate behaviors affecting others. Moral evaluations and behaviors depend in part on moral knowledge and cognitive processes, such as knowledge of rules and values, reasoning about costs and benefits in social interactions, or processes of self-justification. They are also influenced by emotions, such as guilt and feelings of shame, as well as empathic tendencies. Neuroscientific studies indicate that there is a reliable network of brain regions that underpin these processes, a subset of the so-called social brain. Together, psychological and neural processes involved in moral functioning interact in complex ways and evolve through childhood and adolescence.

Given the complexity of moral processes and the multiple neural, cognitive, affective and contextual factors influencing its development, studies of morality have become increasingly diverse theoretically and methodologically and approaches from multiple disciplines including developmental psychology, educational psychology, social psychology, social anthropology, neuroscience, neuroeconomics, neuropsychology are increasingly used. Studies in these areas of research have been developed independently, and researchers often rely on different paradigms. Some studies are carried out without a clear developmental focus on morality. Many research projects investigate moral dimensions only as correlates of other phenomena, and do not consider changes in morality as a function of age or developmental group. Hence, there is a need for studies that shed clearer light on these associations and their developmental facets, and that also join traditions from different disciplines and theoretical perspectives.

This Research Topic seeks to address these gaps by providing a collection of recent advances and novel contributions on the interplay between moral dimensions and social outcomes in children and adolescents. Studies submitted and published in this research topic will ideally address two characteristics: an explicit focus on exploring the connections between moral dimensions and social outcomes in childhood and/or adolescence and a novel contribution to the literature on this topic.

We solicit contributions on morality and associated social outcomes that provide a novel outlook for the field, for example by proposing new theoretical conceptualizations or perspectives, using innovative methodologies, or crossing different lines or traditions of research. Contributions can be theoretical, systematic reviews of the literature, as well as original studies or brief reports, that present results from data collected in either typically developing community samples or children and adolescents with atypical development.

All the contributions of the Research topic must have a clear developmental perspective, by investigating developmental processes and mechanisms, collecting longitudinal data, comparing different age groups, or discussing conceptualizations of the data in light of age-related specificities of the sample.