Social cognition and moral cognition in bullying: What's ... - DPSS

emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, guilt, and a neutral face). An example of an
emotion story taken from Sutton et al. (1999b) is:
«Mike wants to go out with his friends, but he has a really bad tummy ache. He
knows that if his Mum notices he is ill, she won’t let him go out to play. Mike
goes downstairs and asks his Mum, “Can I go out to play please?”»;
c) Moral stories: in these stories the appropriate emotion is a moral emotion
because some wrongdoing has happened. In these stories children were also
helped with the drawings. An example of moral story (new) is as follows:
«Claudia has just moved to her new school. She has brown hair, green eyes and
she is a little bit shorter than her classmates. During the maths class, without
being noticed by her teacher, Susan, who sits behind Claudia, sends her a
written note like “Pigmy, dwarf”. Claudia reads this note and starts crying in
front of all her mates».
Each story was followed by a control question based on the content of the story to
verify that the child understood it; then, an experimental question assessing the
understanding of mental states or emotions was asked. For the cognitive stories, an
answer was considered correct if the child referred to the mental state, thoughts, or
beliefs of the characters (e.g. critical question: “Where will the Red army look for the
Blue army and why?”; answer: “They will look by the sea because they think that the
prisoner is lying to them”). For the emotion stories, a correct answer included both the
identification of the appropriate emotion (positive or negative) and the reference to the
intention/wish of the main character to hide his/her own real emotion to the other
characters, for example when a character is “sad” but he or she appears “happy” (e.g.
15