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Adolescents' Self-Attributed Moral Emotions Following A Moral Transgression: Relations With Delinquency, Confidence In Moral Judgment, And Age, Tobias Krettenauer, Dana Eichler

Psychology Faculty Publications

The study investigates adolescents' self-attributed moral emotions following a moral transgression by expanding research with children on the happy-victimizer phenomenon. In a sample of 200 German adolescents from Grades 7, 9, 11, and 13 (M = 16.18 years, SD = 2.41), participants were confronted with various scenarios describing different moral rule violations and asked to judge the behavior from a moral point of view. Subsequently, participants' strength of self-evaluative emotional reactions was assessed as they were asked to imagine that they had committed the moral transgression by themselves. Results indicate that the intensity of self-attributed moral emotions predicted adolescents' …