Typical and behaviourally disruptive children's understanding of the emotional consequences of socio-moral events

Twenty‐four behaviourally disruptive (BD) and 24 typical 6‐ to 12‐year‐old children were given two interviews in which they judged the emotional outcomes and provided rationales for emotions resulting from inhibitory moral, conventional, prosocial, and personal socio‐moral events. Children's emotional expectancies varied with the socio‐moral rule system and event participant (actor vs. recipient) being assessed. In addition, BD and typical children differed in some of the emotions and rationales they anticipated as outcomes. Group differences were most pronounced for inhibitory (victimization) and prosocial morality. Compared to their peers, BD children minimized the fear associated with victimization, and explained victimizers' emotions with more references to desirable material and psychological consequences, and fewer references to the loss, harm, and unfairness that victimizers had created. BD children were also more likely to attribute prosocial actors' emotions to the harm, loss, and unfairness that had been avoided, and to provide fewer references to the beneficial outcomes created for recipients. Overall, BD children were also more likely than typical children to select sadness as an emotional outcome. Discussion focused on the potential role of atypical emotional expectancies in perpetuating BD children's maladaptive patterns of socio‐moral behaviour.