ABSTRACT
Is children’s morality mostly the result of early emotional processes involving fear, guilt, love, and empathy, with few direct connections to reasoning? Or, alternatively, is children’s morality mostly the result of cognitive principles that act to overcome irrational and sometimes immoral affective impulses? Almost 20 years have passed since Gibbs and Schnell’s (1985) important effort to recognize and reconcile the tension between these historical affective and cognitive views of moral development. Yet, despite notable progress in understanding the origins of children’s moral development since then (see Nucci, 2001; Turiel, 1998, for reviews), attempts to bridge the affective/cognitive divide are still relatively rare. Our goal is to summarize two related literatures, which, we believe, illustrate one important way in which children’s cognitions and emotions about moral events can converge in a larger, coherent model of moral development.
