Appraising the Human Developmental Sciences: Essays in Honor of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly

15. Conscience in Childhood: Past, Present, and Future

15 Conscience in Childhood Past, Present, and Future Grazyna Kochanska and Nazan Aksan 238 Conscience, the inner guidance system, is perhaps the single most powerful factor that underpins individuals’ sociomoral competence and prevents destructive and callous conduct. Conscience is a core component of the child’s overall profile of mental health, sociomoral competencies, and vulnerabilities. A mature conscience is associated with adaptive functioning. A deficient conscience is characterized by callous, disruptive, aggressive, antisocial, and underregulated behavior . Such behavior is the most common mental health concern in children and adolescents. Conscience has a rich conceptual history in human thought. For centuries we have wondered how individuals internalize the values of their families and societies and how those values become a reliable inner guiding system for conduct and a vehicle for the intergenerational transmission of values (Grusec, 1997). Developmentalists have pondered when and how children come to feel moral emotions, such as guilt associated with trangressions and empathy toward others; how they become capable and willing to behave according to rules and values without a need for external control; and how they come to appreciate and reason about right and wrong (Grusec, 1997; Kagan, 2005). Research on conscience has focused on several perennial core questions: What are the components of conscience? How are they organized ? How does conscience develop—when does it first emerge, what determines individual differences, and what are the implications of early conscience for future adjustment and psychopathology ? What are the components of conscience? In the past the “grand theories” have tended to focus mostly on one element. Psychoanalysts were concerned mainly with the moral emotion of guilt. Social learning researchers focused mostly on moral conduct, although they considered multiple types of moral behavior. The influential Piagetian -Kohlbergian cognitive-developmental approach focused almost entirely on moral cognition and discounted moral emotions or moral conduct. Contemporary scholars influenced by the cognitive tradition have proposed more differentiated views of morality that concern separate domains of rules and values, such as conventional, moral, personal, and prudential domains (Smetana, 1997; Turiel, Killen, & Helwig, 1987). The psychoanalytic influence, and its focus on moral emotion, reappeared in the 1950s and 1960s in the work of Sears, who revisited the questions about the structure of conscience from the neoHullian standpoint. Attempting to integrate the psychoanalytic and learning views, Sears, Rau, and Alpert (1965) considered both moral emotions and moral conduct, finding them only modestly related. The work since the mid-1970s has been, and most likely will continue to be, influenced by an increasing recognition that the multiple components of conscience—emotion, conduct, and cognition— have to be considered together in a comprehensive manner (Burton, 1984; Dienstbier, Hillman, Lehnhoff, Hillman, & Valkenaar, 1975; Grusec & Goodnow, 1994; Grusec & Kuczynski, 1997; Hoffman, 1983; Kagan, 2005; Radke-Yarrow, Zahn-Waxler, & Chapman, 1983; Thompson, 1998; Turiel, 1998). In his groundbreaking work Hoffman (1983) proposed an elegant model that brought together moral emotions of guilt and empathy, moral conduct, and the cognitive processing of information inherent in moral socialization messages. Emotion researchers have proposed the moral self—a system incorporating the do’s and don’ts of early socialization—as a core component of conscience (Emde, Biringen, Clyman, & Oppenheim, 1991; Emde, Johnson, & Easterbrooks, 1987; Kochanska, 2002a). The question about the components of conscience leads to a related question regarding their organization. How is conscience organized ? Are moral emotions, conduct, and cognition all part of a coherent system, or are they loosely related or even unrelated? Are children who feel more remorseful after a transgression also more likely to comply with rules of conduct and to show more mature moral judgment? Are children who are more empathic also more likely to refrain from cheating? Because the grand developmental theories have usually focused predominantly on one aspect of conscience—emotion, conduct , or cognition—they sidestepped the question of whether those components cohere within an individual child. Hartshorne and May Conscience in Childhood 239 Grazyna Kochanska and Nazan Aksan 240 (1928–1930) were the first to address this issue, in their pioneering study of the structure of character. They examined whether different manifestations of conscience, such as honesty, deceit, self-control, and altruism, were interrelated in a large sample of elementary and high school students, and they found these manifestations to be only weakly related. Two subsequent investigations (Burton, 1963; Rushton, Brainerd , & Pressley, 1983) reexamined Hartshorne and May’s (1928–1930) original data, using newer statistical techniques. These more recent studies showed that...