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Children's Judgments about Psychological Harm in Social Context
Author(s) -
Helwig Charles C.,
Hildebrandt Carolyn,
Turiel Elliot
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1995.tb00958.x
Subject(s) - harm , psychology , context (archaeology) , perspective (graphical) , social psychology , presentation (obstetrics) , developmental psychology , social environment , political science , law , medicine , paleontology , radiology , artificial intelligence , computer science , biology
72 children, ages 6 to 11 years, were presented with a series of stories involving psychological harm (name‐calling) in a game context. Situations were presented in which intentions, consequences, and game context were varied, along with order of story presentation. Comparisons between acts of physical and psychological harm were also conducted. Although responses in some conditions were influenced by order of presentation, age differences were found in children's evaluations of agents' actions and recipients' reactions for psychological harm in game contexts. Younger children were more likely to ignore intentions and consequences or the recipient's perspective and to focus on contextual features (e.g., game rules). Older children were more likely to base their evaluations on intentions, or both intentions and consequences, and to take into account the recipient's perspective. Game context interacted differentially with psychological and physical harm at all ages. Evaluations of acts of physical harm were more likely than acts of psychological harm to be transformed by game context.