He wished he didn't do it

Description

Previous research on apology suggests that young children are relatively insensitive to the implications of apology exchanges. However, the existing literature has focused almost exclusively on children's understanding of the impression management functions of apology. This thesis presents pilot research and five full-scale studies that explored children's understanding of another core function of apology, namely its ability to express and influence emotion. The work presented here, involving children ranging in age from 3 to 9, shows that even young children have a solid grasp on some of the emotional implications of apology. Children showed an understanding that apology can signal remorse in a transgressor and can improve the feelings of a victim. The presence of apology also shifted children's attentions from the gains of a transgressor to the domain of moral rules and concerns. These perspectives held by children were maintained even when children were asked to reason about apologies that had been prompted by an authority figure. However, when strong evidence was provided to indicate that an apology was non-genuine, children were able to acknowledge (1) that an apologizer can experience non-moral inner feelings, and (2) that a victim might feel slightly better when receiving a genuine compared to a non-genuine apology. There was evidence that children ages 7 and older have insights into the complexity of apology that the young children do not have (e.g., awareness that apologies can lead to mixed feelings in victims). This thesis also presents an important initial test of children's actual reactions to receiving an apology; the results meshed nicely with the key emotion attribution findings from the other studies. Finally, another focus of this thesis was parental reasoning about the role of apology. Parents viewed apologies in much the same way that young children did: as most important in the aftermath of moral transgression. Parents reported prompting their children to apologize much more often following moral transgressions compared to conventional transgressions. In summary, the studies in this thesis demonstrate that children possess an impressive amount of insight into the emotional effects of apology. The implications of these findings are considered in detail.

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