Adolescents' conceptions of wealth and societal fairness amid extreme inequality: An Argentine sample.

This study examined how Argentine adolescents' judgments about the fairness of their society are related to their perceptions of actual and ideal societal wealth distribution, just world beliefs, and trust in political institutions. Six hundred ninety-nine Argentine adolescents from three age groups (12-14 years, 15-16 years, and 17-18 years) in high schools from diverse SES communities were presented with five images depicting more or less egalitarian patterns of national wealth distribution. Participants chose the images that best represented actual and ideal wealth distribution in Argentina, and also rated their level of political trust, general and personal beliefs in a just world (BJW), and views regarding the fairness of Argentine society. Findings revealed that there was a significant gap between adolescents' conception of current wealth distribution and their more egalitarian choices for ideal wealth distribution. In addition, adolescents who judged that the distribution of actual economic resources was more egalitarian had more positive views of the fairness of Argentine society, as well as higher levels of political trust and BJW. Moreover, regression analyses revealed that adolescents' views of the overall fairness of society were independently predicted by both their economic judgments and their noneconomic judgments (political trust and both general and personal BJW), and these effects were not moderated by adolescents' age group or school SES. Notwithstanding the lack of moderated effects (i.e., relations among variables), older adolescents and those from higher SES schools had more negative views of overall fairness of society, the egalitarian nature of existing wealth distribution, political trust, and BJW. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Adolescents' conceptions of national wealth distribution: Connections with perceived societal fairness and academic plans.

This study examined mostly lower-middle-income Latino (37%) and African American (33%) adolescents' (N = 90, Mage = 15.90) conceptions of how U.S. wealth is and ought to be distributed, and whether these judgments are related to adolescents' views about societal and legal fairness and their immediate academic plans. Individually administered multipart interviews assessed conceptions regarding (a) actual and ideal U.S. wealth distribution and related "Rawlsian" judgments, (b) social system and legal fairness, and (c) adolescents' near-term life goals. Overall, adolescents underestimated actual levels of U.S. wealth inequality while also preferring a more egalitarian distribution than was believed to exist. Adolescents' wealth-related reasoning was mostly unrelated to other societal or personal judgments, whereas societal and legal fairness judgments were related to personal academic plans. Although adolescents had generally negative views of societal and legal fairness, having more positive fairness conceptions was related to a greater emphasis on academic plans. Compared with their younger peers, older adolescents preferred somewhat more wealth inequality for motivational and economic reasons and preferred living in a society with some inequality. (PsycINFO Database Record

Children's moral emotions, narratives, and aggression: relations with maternal discipline and support.

Children who attribute more positive emotions to hypothetical moral victimizers are typically more aggressive and have more behavior problems. Little is known, however, about when individual differences in these moral emotion attributions first emerge or about maternal correlates of these differences. In this study, 63 4-6-year-olds judged how they would feel after victimizing peers for gain and enacted event conclusions using narrative methods adapted from the MacArthur Story Stem Battery. In addition, children's mothers completed assessments of their disciplinary styles and social support, and children's aggressive tendencies were assessed based on ratings from mothers and a second familiar adult. Results revealed that most preschoolers expected to feel happy after their victimizing acts, but variations in happy victimization were unrelated to children's aggression. Several of children's narrative themes, including making amends (e.g., apologizing, reparations), aggressive acts, and mentions of death/killing, however, were related to children's aggression. Moreover, two maternal disciplinary dimensions, higher warmth and reasoning, as well as greater social support were also related to lower child aggression. Children's emotion attributions and moral narratives, however, were unrelated to maternal disciplinary practices or social support.

Coping with negative emotions: connections with adolescents' academic performance and stress.

The authors assessed connections among adolescents' emotional dispositions, negative academic affect, coping strategies, academic stress, and overall grade point average (GPA). A total of 119 ninth through 12th-grade students completed assessments for (a) overall positive and negative moods, (b) GPA, and (c) academically related variables involving stress, negative emotions, and engaged and disengaged coping strategies. Greater negative academic affect and disengaged coping were related to lower GPAs, and disengaged coping mediated the connection between negative academic affect and GPA. By contrast, higher academic stress was related to students' overall moods, negative academic affect, and disengaged coping; disengaged coping mediated the connection between academic stress and negative overall moods. Discussion focused on the especially problematic nature of disengaged academic coping.

Adolescents' perceptions of institutional fairness: relations with moral reasoning, emotions, and behavior.

This article addresses how low-income urban adolescents view the fairness of different aspects of American society, including how wealth is distributed, the nature of legal constraints, and overall social opportunities and legitimacy. This research emerged from efforts to understand the moral and emotional nature of some adolescents' aggressive tendencies. Recently it has become clearer that aggression can serve many purposes and that, for some adolescents, aggression is a coherent though problematic response to larger familial, neighborhood, and institutional forces. Consequently, the authors focus on the connections between low-income adolescents' perceptions of institutional and interpersonal fairness, certain aggressive tendencies, and related emotion judgments. At the same time, relatively little is known about how low-income adolescents as a group perceive the fairness of wealth distribution and other broad aspects of American society. Consequently, a second important goal is to examine these adolescents' normative beliefs about institutional fairness at a time of growing financial and educational inequalities in the United States.

Social information processing, emotions, and aggression: conceptual and methodological contributions of the special section articles.

This discussion summarizes some of the key conceptual and methodological contributions of the four articles in this special section on social information processing (SIP) and aggression. One major contribution involves the new methodological tools these studies provide for future researchers. Eye-tracking and mood induction techniques will make it possible for SIP researchers to study attentional and emotion-related processes across the six SIP steps. In addition, the STEP-P instrument will open up the study of emotionally-charged aspects of preschoolers' early SIP. A second contribution is how these articles emphasize the dynamic interplay of emotional and cognitive processes in the emergence of children's and adolescents' aggressive tendencies. Finally, implicit developmental themes are raised by several of these studies. Discussion concludes with suggestions for future research, including a focus on the positive (i.e., nondisruptive) role of emotions, and on the connections between moral development and aggression.

Social information processing, moral reasoning, and emotion attributions: relations with adolescents' reactive and proactive aggression.

Connections between adolescents' social information processing (SIP), moral reasoning, and emotion attributions and their reactive and proactive aggressive tendencies were assessed. One hundred mostly African American and Latino 13- to 18-year-olds from a low-socioeconomic-status (SES) urban community and their high school teachers participated. Reactive aggression was uniquely related to expected ease in enacting aggression, lower verbal abilities, and hostile attributional biases, and most of these connections were mediated by adolescents' attention problems. In contrast, proactive aggression was uniquely related to higher verbal abilities and expectations of more positive emotional and material outcomes resulting from aggression. Discussion focused on the utility of assessing both moral and SIP-related cognitions, and on the potential influence of low-SES, high-risk environments on these findings.

Adolescents' emotion expectancies regarding aggressive and nonaggressive events: connections with behavior problems.

A total of 50 behaviorally disruptive (conduct-disordered or oppositional defiant-disordered) adolescents and 50 comparison adolescents assessed how they expected to feel following both aggressive and nonaggressive situations. Compared with their peers, behaviorally disruptive adolescents expected fewer normative emotions and exhibited somewhat more of an anger emphasis in their nonaggressive emotion attributions, and they expected to feel happier following acts of instrumental/proactive aggression. These patterns of emotion expectancies were linked more closely with teacher ratings of adolescents' proactive aggression than with ratings of reactive aggression. Regression analyses indicated that both nonaggression emotion expectancies and proactive aggression happiness made independent contributions to predicting adolescents' externalizing tendencies. Discussion focused on the contributions of different types of self-attributed emotion expectancies to adolescents' social understanding and behavior.

Aggression and moral development: integrating social information processing and moral domain models.

Social information processing and moral domain theories have developed in relative isolation from each other despite their common focus on intentional harm and victimization, and mutual emphasis on social cognitive processes in explaining aggressive, morally relevant behaviors. This article presents a selective summary of these literatures with the goal of showing how they can be integrated into a single, coherent model. An essential aspect of this integration is Crick and Dodge's (1994) distinction between latent mental structures and online processing. It is argued that moral domain theory is relevant for describing underlying mental structures regarding the nature and boundaries of what is moral, whereas the social information processing model describes the online information processing that affects application of moral structures during peer interactions.

Emotion-related abilities and depressive symptoms in Latina mothers and their children.

This study examined the abilities of 40 Latina mothers and their 6- to 11-year-old children (20 girls, 20 boys) to recognize and produce emotion expressions and how these abilities differed as a function of maternal depressive symptoms. The results indicated that depressively symptomatic mothers were less accurate at recognizing basic emotions (e.g., happy, sad, etc.) and some mixed emotions (e.g., scared/ok combinations) than nonsymptomatic mothers, but there were no group differences for emotion production. In contrast, children of symptomatic mothers posed fewer recognizable sad expressions than their peers. Error pattern analyses also revealed that children of symptomatic mothers were more likely to mistakenly recognize happiness and to avoid posing sadness (across all basic emotions). Children's ability to pose emotions was related to their mothers' emotion production, and this was not moderated by maternal depressive symptoms. The discussion focuses on the possible interpersonal consequences of these biases and deficits in the emotion-related abilities of symptomatic mothers and their children and on the need to conduct research on the familial and cultural processes that might underlie these findings.

Parent--child emotion communication, attachment, and affective narratives.

Forty-four pre-schoolers (ages 4.3 to 5.8 years) and their primary caregivers participated in a study on the connections between parent-child emotion communication and a narrative assessment of pre-schoolers' attachment. Children completed the Separation Anxiety Test (SAT), a narrative assessment of children's responses to attachment-related separations (including self-reliance, avoidance, attachment and coherence scores). Several aspects of parent-child discussions of emotion-eliciting events were also assessed in the Emotion Communication Task. Results indicated that SAT coherence was positively related to SAT attachment and negatively related to SAT avoidance. Furthermore, SAT coherence was positively related to parental scaffolding and negatively related to parental and child negativity during the Emotion Communication Task. Parental scaffolding and child reciprocity were positively related to each other and, in general, were negatively related to parental and child negativity. Discussion focused on the potential contributions of children's interactions with caregivers to the development of children's attachment narratives and emotion-related understanding.