Conscience in the classroom: Early adolescents’ moral emotions, moral judgments, and moral identity as predictors of their interpersonal behaviour

Traditionally research on moral development has focused on children’s moral reasoning (i.e., on their justifications for giving a particular moral judgment) but it has been recognized for a long time that a comprehensive account of such behaviour should not only include cognitive processes but emotional and self-related processes as well. In the last decade the work of Kochanska with young children has been exemplary in that moral cognitions, emotions and self-related processes, and conduct were all taken into account. A key question guiding this work is whether these aspects of moral functioning are all part of a coherent system, or whether they are only loosely related or even unrelated (Kochanska & Aksan, 2004). Based on her work with young children, Kochanska concluded that the different aspects actually do cohere, which led her to reintroduce the term conscience into developmental psychological theorizing.