Project Details
Projekt
Effects of Self-Regulatory Skills on Moral Behavior and Moral-Related Aspects of Personality in Adolescence.
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Rebecca Bondü
Subject Area
Developmental and Educational Psychology
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 426314138
Moral behavior, for example including prosocial behavior, such as helping, sharing, and comforting, or decisions and reasoning in moral dilemma situations, often requires pronounced self-regulatory skills that allow to suppress primary, selfish behavioral impulses in favor of altruistic behavior. Previous empirical research findings underscore this assumption by showing that high self-regulatory skills, such as executive functions, predict prosocial and moral behavior. Little, however, is known about these links during adolescence. In addition, various cognitive, affective, and behavioral self-regulatory skills were hardly considered simultaneously and, therefore, little is known about their relative importance in predicting moral behavior. Furthermore, potential differential influences of self-regulatory skils on moral-related aspects of personality have hardly been investigated. Hence, factors potentially influencing moral identity and the moral-related trait of justice sensitivity are largely unknown, although building a moral identity is a key developmental task during adolescence and although the justice norm is particularly important in this age range. Self-regulatory skills can be assumed to also promote moral-related aspects of personality, because they should permanently enable the individual to better regulate affect and behavior also in moral-related situations which should be enhanced and finally internalized. In ordert o fill these gaps in research, the present study will assess a variety of affecitve, cognitive, and behavioral, basal and complex self-regulatory skills, moral behavior, moral identiy, and justice sensitivity in about 1500 participants between 15 and 20 years of age that already took part in a longitudinal study with three waves of measurement during in middle childhood. This way, the study will be able to examine which self-regulatory skills show prospective influences on moral behavior and moral-related aspects of personality during adolescence, to what extent there may be differential links, and whether the expected link between self-regulatory skills and moral behavior is mediated by moral-related aspects of personality in this age range. The study results may then be used to design tailored preventive and interventive measures with a special focus on self-regulatory skills in order to promote moral behavior and aspects of personality and, thereby, adaptive developmental patterns in general.
DFG Programme
Research Units
