Children's play narrative responses to hypothetical dilemmas and their awareness of moral emotions

Five-year-old children's moral development was assessed using a projective doll-play technique (the MacArthur Story Stem Battery; MSSB), an emotion-un derstanding task, concurrent maternal reports of behaviour problems and chi ld performance in a cheating task. Three narrative scales were derived from the children's MSSB play themes: a non-physical punishment scale, a prosoc ial scale and an antisocial scale. The children's use of non-physical disci plining themes was related to their awareness of moral emotions. The antiso cial and prosocial narrative scales were related to concurrent maternal rat ings of externalizing and internalizing problems, respectively. Although th e emotions children anticipated in the emotion-understanding task did not p redict behaviour in the cheating task, their justifications for the differe nt emotions tended to do so, as did the prosocial play narrative scale. The findings suggest a degree of coherence across the assessments of moral dev elopment, and are discussed with reference to children's script-based under standing.