The Role of Second-Order Belief-Understanding and Social Context in Children's Self-Attribution of Social Emotions

Children's self-attribution of social emotions was hypothesised (i) to be related to their second-order belief-understanding and (ii) to be more strongly related to social- conventional than moral rule violations. Thirty children aged between 4 and 7 years were presented with Sullivan, Zaitchik & Tager-Flusberg's (1994) second-order false belief task and with four hypothetical scenarios in which they were required to imagine that they had violated particular moral and social conventional rules. As predicted, the self-attribution of social emotions was significantly related to second-order belief understanding, primarily in social-conventional rather than moral contexts.