3-186 - Feeling good and being good: Conceptual and empirical links between positive emotions and morality

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Human morality and emotion are both deep-rooted instincts. From early in life, we are capable of having positive emotions, performing moral behaviors, and recognizing the good feelings and good deeds in others. In the past decades, developmental researchers have made significant progress in uncovering the origins and development of our moral and emotional tendencies. However, moral development and emotional development have been mostly studied separately, preventing us from having complete pictures of both topics. This symposium brings together cutting-edge research from multiple labs, to shed light on the conceptual and empirical links between positive emotions and moral behaviors during development.

The first paper illustrates how positive emotions contribute to moral behaviors in childhood: Four-year-old children experience gratitude (positive evaluations of the helper) after receiving help, which motivates them to share with other new individuals. The second paper demonstrates how witnessing or performing moral behaviors could lead to experience of positive emotions: Preschoolers show signs of elevation after seeing others get helped and after helping others even when helping was costly. Finally, the third paper shows that moral behaviors and positive emotions are perceived as inseparable in children’s minds: Young children view people who are morally bad as significantly less happy compared to those who are morally good. Together, this symposium provides novel theoretical and empirical insights that feeling good and being good are two psychological tendencies that are fundamentally linked at behavioral, affective and cognitive levels, demonstrating the prospects and necessity to study their intersections in future developmental research.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chair

• Fan Yang, Yale University

Discussant

• Paul Bloom, Yale University

Individual Presentations

• Upstream reciprocity in preschool-age children: Evidence for early gratitude? - Presenting Author: Stefen James Garrett Beeler, University of Virginia; Non-Presenting Author: Amrisha Vaish, The University of Virginia

• Studying elevation in early childhood - Presenting Author: Robert Hepach, Leipzig University

• Bad people are not happy: Children perceive morality as essential to happiness - Presenting Author: Fan Yang, Yale University; Non-Presenting Author: Joshua Knobe, Yale University; Non-Presenting Author: Yarrow Dunham, Yale