Internalization of Moral Standards in Young Children

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DESCRIPTION: (adapted from investigator's abstract) This project's overarching objective is to elucidate how very young children come to internalize rules, values, and standards of behavior. Thus, the focus is on the early development of conscience, which is seen as an increasingly complex system that encompasses moral emotions, behavioral self-regulation, moral understanding, and the moral self. Conscience develops in the process of an intricate interplay between children's early temperamental characteristics and their relationships with the caregivers. The 5-year longitudinal study of 100 children and both of their parents, followed from 7 to 52 months, has 5 goals. (1) To examine the role of a close, positive, mutually responsive orientation evolving in some parent-child dyads for the early development of children's conscience, (2) To examine the role of children's temperament in the development of conscience, alone and in the interplay with early relationships, (3) To explore parent-child discourse about the child's past behavior as an important context for moral socialization, (4) To understand how parents' personality may influence the development of children's conscience, and (5) To explore early conscience development in the context of the network of integrated early family relationships. This research brings together literatures on emotions, temperament, relationships, socialization, parent-child discourse, autobiographical memory, and ecology of the family. It employs behavioral observations in diverse naturalistic contexts, multiple standard laboratory paradigms, parents' ratings, and parents' and children's self-reports. Measures are aggregated at multiple levels to produce robust constructs. The analyses elucidate causal mechanisms responsible for links among the constructs (mediation) and multiple causal pathways (moderation) using structural equations modeling. The promise of this research is both conceptual and practical. It will articulate and refine a comprehensive theoretical model of early conscience, a central construct in socialization theories. Conscience that serves as an effective internal guide of conduct is a critical component of mental health, and disturbances of conscience mark antisocial developmental trajectories. By elucidating adaptive and maladaptive early developmental pathways, this work will enhance the understanding of the nature of early developmental risks, and it will inform effective interventions that may help offset those risks.