The happy victimizer demarks a phenomenon in which there is a discrepancy between young children's understanding of moral rules and their attribution of positive emotions to wrongdoers. In this paper, we argue why developmental transitions in this aspect of emotion understanding have both theoretical and applied value. First, the research literature on moral emotion expectancies is critically reviewed and methodological constraints of the happy victimizer experimental paradigm are discussed. Second, we elaborate on the connections between moral emotion expectancies and children's understanding of human agency. It is argued that the coordination process involved in making moral emotion attributions and moral judgments is a key element in the evolving moral self. Third, the developmental significance of moral emotion expectancies for children's and adolescent's externalizing symptoms and adaptive behavior is discussed.

Despite being eclipsed in recent years by simulation theory, theory of mind and accounts of executive functioning, social-relational approaches to perspective taking and coordination based on the ideas of Jean Piaget and George Herbert Mead have never completely disappeared from the literature of developmental psychology. According to the social-relational view presented here, perspectives are holistic orientations to situations, within which individuals coordinate their actions and interactions with objects and others. The developmental processes by which perspectives are occupied, differentiated, and coordinated move from (1) prereflective interactivity (i.e., positioning within routine, repetitive interactive sequences during infancy and early childhood), to (2) reflective intersubjectivity (i.e., the simultaneous consideration and use of multiple perspectives within the intersubjective transactions of later childhood and early adolescence – processes that are accelerated and extended through increasingly sophisticated uses of language), and finally to (3) metareflective sociality (i.e., the abstracted and generalized social engagement across a diversity of personal, interpersonal, and sociocultural perspectives witnessed in mature adult negotiations and problem solving). These social-relational processes are used to reinterpret, revise, and extend Robert Selman’s theory of the development of perspective taking and coordination. The result is a developmental process of occupying, experiencing, coordinating, and engaging across a diversity of perspectives within interactive, intersubjective, and psychological-sociocultural transactions that spans the course of individuals’ lives and captures some facets of the complex, transformative, and ongoing interplay between societies and persons.

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Agency is a relational developmental construct. The most basic form of agency is already present in the dynamic, self‐organizing activities of living systems. We discuss how, from the earliest point in the development of persons, agency manifests in different forms and grows through the interrelations of various bio‐psycho‐social processes. These processes can be organized into general levels, including the levels of biophysical agency, psychosocial agency, and sociocultural agency. We further describe how the most flexible and richest forms of agency seen in adulthood build from developmental processes evidenced throughout the life span: infants’ sensorimotor and perceptual functioning, toddlers’ symbolic representational and linguistic functioning, the child's self‐regulatory functioning, and adolescents’ and young adults’ moral functioning. Altogether these functions provide persons with the ability to create the conditions for their own agency, particularly through their participation in community life. This chapter ends with a discussion of the role that civic institutions, especially higher education, must play in expanding human agency.