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Study explores brain activity behind children’s moral judgements

Recent findings indicated children’s moral judgements are a result of both early and automatic processing and later cognitive reassessment, while sharing is a predicted by the latter.

“Despite cultural and individual variation, humans are a judgmental bunch,” Jason M. Cowell, PhD, and Jean Decety, PhD, of the University of Chicago, wrote. “There is accumulating evidence for early social and moral evaluation as shown by research with infants and children documenting the notion that some behaviors are perceived as right and others are perceived as wrong. Moreover, social interactions are governed by a concern for fairness and others’ well-being. However, although generosity increases between infancy and late childhood, it is less clear what mechanisms guide this change.”

To assess the temporal neurodynamics of moral evaluation in children aged 3 to 5 years, researchers conducted electroencephalograms (EEG), eye tracking and behavioral tracking while children viewed short videos of cartoon characters helping or harming each other.

Eye tracking showed that the amount of attention paid to characters did not differ between the two types of actions. However, EEG indicated differences in brain activity when viewing a helpful or harmful scene.

Researchers observed greater brain activity associated with automatic emotional responses when viewing helping scenes, while activity associated with detecting and reacting to conflict — a slower process — was greater when viewing harming scenes.

To determine if early automatic or later controlled neural activity predicted actual moral behavior, researchers assessed children’s generosity according to how many stickers they shared with an anonymous child. They correlated generosity with individual differences in brain activity during helping vs. harming scenes.

Findings indicated that differences in brain signals associated with deliberate neural processing predicted sharing behavior, suggesting moral behavior in children is more significantly associated with controlled reflection than immediate emotional response.

“Taken together, the current study demonstrates how young children exhibit automatic responses to morally laden stimuli and reappraise these stimuli in a controlled manner. Thus, children’s moral judgments are the result of an integration of both early and automatic processing of helping and harming scenarios and later cognitively controlled reappraisal of these scenes. Importantly, the latter, but not the former, predicts actual sharing behavior,” the researchers concluded. – by Amanda Oldt

Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.