Children's Narrative Accounts and Judgments of Their Own Peer-Exclusion Experiences

When I hurt others, and when I get hurt: Integrating victim and perpetrator experiences of harm into a sense of moral agency

“…Regardless of sample, perpetrator narratives were elicited in terms of “a time when you did or said something, and someone got hurt”, and victim narratives as “a time when someone did or said something, and you got hurt.” This wording allowed for both unintentional and intentional harm, as well as the sort of “not‐quite‐intentional” harms on which we wanted to focus (Wainryb & Brehl, ; Wainryb et al, ). Pre‐adolescents and adolescents were asked to focus on “a friend or a kid you know well,” and were provided additional language to ensure a complete account, “remember, I wasn’t there, so tell me everything that happened.” Young adults were given a prompt that asked them to “Please describe what happened, when it happened, who was involved, what you were thinking and feeling, why this experience is significant, and what it may say about you and your personality.” The “someone” was not constrained for the young adults, and their narratives typically focused on friends, romantic partners, and acquaintances, but a few events were linked to parents and colleagues or supervisors.…”

“…We all easily recall experiences of being hurt by others, and experiences when we harmed other people. Although this landscape of interpersonal harm includes major traumas and serious transgressions (e.g., Wainryb, ), it is dominated far more by everyday slings and arrows (Baumeister, Stilman, & Wotman, ; Wainryb, Brehl, & Matwin, ; Wainryb, Komolova, & Brehl, ). Through experiencing and narrating these harms, from both perspectives, people develop a sense of themselves and others as moral agents (Pasupathi & Wainryb, ; Wainryb & Pasupathi, ).…”

Saints, and the Rest of Us: Broadening the Perspective on Moral Identity Development

“…Although the life story in its full form is a developmental achievement of late adolescence and early adulthood [Habermas & Bluck, 2000], research on children's autobiographical narration has shown that children as young as 5 can construct meaningful accounts of their experiences [Fivush & Nelson, 2004;Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010b;Reese, Yan, Jack, & Hayne, 2010]. More-over, work in our laboratory has shown more specifically that, starting at least at the age of 5, children can construct fairly coherent narrative accounts of their own morally-laden experiences [Recchia, Wainryb, Bourne, & Pasupathi, 2015;Recchia, Wainryb, & Pasupathi, 2013;Wainryb, Brehl, & Matwin, 2005;Wainryb, Komolova, & Brehl, 2014].…”

“I wanted to hurt her”: Children’s and adolescents’ experiences of desiring and seeking revenge in their own peer conflicts

“…When youth described desiring revenge but not retaliating, they were asked why they did not carry out their desired response. The coding scheme was developed based on research examining children's judgments of retaliation (Smetana et al, 2003), as well as other research on children's reasoning about their own transgressive behaviors (Wainryb, Komolova, & Brehl, 2014;Wainryb et al, 2005). Our coding was intentionally fine-grained, given the paucity of research addressing this issue; it should be noted that some categories occurred relatively infrequently and are reported primarily for descriptive purposes.…”