The role of second-order belief-understanding and social context in children's self-attribution of social emotions

Children's self-attribution of social emotions was hypothesised (i) th be related to their second-order belief-understanding and (ii) to be more strongly related to social-conventional than moral rule violations. Thirty children aged between 4 and 7 years presented with Sullivan, Zaitchik & Tager-Flusberg's (1994) second-order false belief task and with four hypothetical scenarios in which they were required to imagine that they had violated particular moral and social conventional rules. As predicted, the self-attribution of social emotions was significantly related to second-order belief understanding, primarily in social-conventional rather that moral contexts.