The Role of Social Value Orientation in Chinese Adolescents’ Moral Emotion Attribution

Previous studies have explored the role of cognitive factors and sympathy in children’s development of moral emotion attribution, but the effect of personal dispositional factors on adolescents’ moral emotion expectancy has been neglected. In this study, we address this issue by testing adolescents’ moral emotion attribution with different social value orientation (SVO). Eight hundred and eighty Chinese adolescents were classified into proselfs, prosocials and mixed types in SVO and asked to indicate their moral emotions in four moral contexts (prosocial, antisocial, failing to act prosocially (FAP) and resisting antisocial impulse (RAI)). The findings revealed an obvious contextual effect in adolescents’ moral emotion attribution and the effect depends on SVO. Prosocials evaluated more positively than proselfs and mixed types in the prosocial and RAI contexts, but proselfs evaluated more positively than prosocials and mixed types in the antisocial and FAP contexts. The findings indicate that individual differences of adolescents’ moral emotion attribution have roots in their social value orientation, and suggest the role of dispositional factors in the processing of moral emotion.