ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Precursors to morality in development as a complex interplay between neural, socioenvironmental, and behavioral facets.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Origin and Development of Moral Sense: A Systematic Review.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Pooled it
- Neural Foundations Supporting Prosocial Behaviors: A Scoping Review of EEG/ERP Evidence During Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Eleven-Month-Old Infants Preferentially Look at Helpers But Do Not Reliably Evaluate Inconsistent Actors.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- The Dark Side of Moral Conviction-Integrating Political Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Third-party punishment-like behavior in a rat model.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- An Eye-Tracking Study on Six Early Social-Emotional Abilities in Children Aged 1 to 3 Years.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Parents' Political Ideology Predicts How Their Children Punish.Psychological science · 2022Article
- Maternal Communication with Preschool Children about Morality: A Coding Scheme for a Book-Sharing Task.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Infants' neural responses to helping and hindering scenarios.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
- Emotion or Evaluation: Cultural Differences in the Parental Socialization of Moral Judgement.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Neural computations in children's third-party interventions are modulated by their parents' moral values.NPJ science of learning · 2021Article
- The neurodevelopment of social preferences in early childhood.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2021Review
- Déficits précoces de l'empathie et psychopathologie Early empathy deficits and psychopathology.Neuropsychiatrie de l'enfance et de l'adolescence · 2021Article
- The association between toddlerhood empathy deficits and antisocial personality disorder symptoms and psychopathy in adulthood.Development and psychopathology · 2021Article
- Cortical Activation to Social and Mechanical Stimuli in the Infant Brain.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2021Article
- Why do preschoolers perpetuate inequalities? Theoretical perspectives on inequity preferences in the face of emerging concerns for equality.Developmental review : DR · 2020Article
- Do 15-month-old infants prefer helpers? A replication of HamlinRoyal Society open science · 2020Article
- Social evaluation and imitation of prosocial and antisocial agents in infants, children, and adults.PloS one · 2020Article
- Impression Formation in the Human Infant Brain.Cerebral cortex communications · 2020Article
- Moral identity relates to the neural processing of third-party moral behavior.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2019Article
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Abstract
The nature and underpinnings of infants' seemingly complex, third-party, social evaluations remain highly contentious. Theoretical perspectives oscillate between rich and lean interpretations of the same expressed preferences. Although some argue that infants and toddlers possess a "moral sense" based on core knowledge of the social world, others suggest that social evaluations are hierarchical in nature and the product of an integration of rudimentary general processes such as attention allocation and approach and avoidance. Moreover, these biologically prepared minds interact in social environments that include significant variation, which are likely to impact early social evaluations and behavior. The present study examined the neural underpinnings of and precursors to moral sensitivity in infants and toddlers (n = 73, ages 12-24 mo) through a series of interwoven measures, combining multiple levels of analysis including electrophysiological, eye-tracking, behavioral, and socioenvironmental. Continuous EEG and time-locked event-related potentials (ERPs) and gaze fixation were recorded while children watched characters engaging in prosocial and antisocial actions in two different tasks. All children demonstrated a neural differentiation in both spectral EEG power density modulations and time-locked ERPs when perceiving prosocial or antisocial agents. Time-locked neural differences predicted children's preference for prosocial characters and were influenced by parental values regarding justice and fairness. Overall, this investigation casts light on the fundamental nature of moral cognition, including its underpinnings in general processes such as attention and approach-withdrawal, providing plausible mechanisms of early change and a foundation for forward movement in the field of developmental social neuroscience.
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