Children's reasoning about self-presentation following rule violations: the role of self-focused attention.
Rule violations are likely to serve as key contexts for learning to reason about public identity. In an initial study with 91 children aged 4-9years, social emotions and self-presentational concerns were more likely to be cited when children were responding to hypothetical vignettes involving social-conventional rather than moral violations. In 2 further studies with 376 children aged 4-9years, experimental manipulations of self-focused attention (either by leading children to believe they were being video-recorded or by varying audience reactions to transgressions) were found to elicit greater attention to social evaluation following moral violations, although self-presentational concerns were consistently salient in the context of social-conventional violations. The role of rule transgressions in children's emerging self-awareness and social understanding is discussed.
School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK. robinb@sussex.ac.uk
Robin
R
Banerjee
Mark
M
Bennett
Nikki
N
Luke
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology*; D003243:Consciousness / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D012737:Sex Factors