Obiols-Suari Núria, Marco-Pallarés Josep
Department of Theory and History of Education, Group Research of Moral Education GREM, Institute of Educational Research IRE, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
Department of Cognition, Development and Educational Psychology, Institute of Neurosciences, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
Front Psychol. 2021 Apr 23;12:552387. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.552387. eCollection 2021.
Children usually use the external and physical features of characters in movies or stories as a means of categorizing them quickly as being either good or bad/evil. This categorization is probably done by means of heuristics and previous experience. However, the study of this fast processing is difficult in children. In this paper, we propose a new experimental paradigm to determine how these decisions are made. We used illustrations of characters in folk tales, whose visual representations contained features that were compatible or incompatible with the moral identity of the characters. Sixteen children between 8 and 10 years old participated in the experiment. We measured their electrodermal activity when they were listening to the story and looking at pictures of the characters. Results revealed a higher increase in skin conductance when the illustrations showed a moral condition that was incompatible with the actions of a character than when they showed one that was compatible. These results suggest that children make fast decisions about the moral identity of characters based on their physical features. They open up new possibilities in the study of the processing of moral decisions in children.
儿童通常利用电影或故事中人物的外在和身体特征，作为快速将他们归类为好人或坏人/邪恶之人的一种方式。这种分类可能是通过启发法和以往经验来完成的。然而，对儿童这种快速处理过程的研究颇具难度。在本文中，我们提出了一种新的实验范式，以确定这些决策是如何做出的。我们使用了民间故事中人物的插图，其视觉呈现包含与人物道德身份相符或不符的特征。16名8至10岁的儿童参与了实验。我们测量了他们在听故事并观看人物图片时的皮肤电活动。结果显示，当插图呈现出与人物行为不符的道德状况时，皮肤电导的增加幅度高于呈现相符状况时。这些结果表明，儿童基于人物的身体特征对其道德身份做出快速决策。它们为儿童道德决策处理过程的研究开辟了新的可能性。
