Emotional and moral development

Running head : Emotional and Moral Development

Understanding Emotional and Moral Development

Introduction

Developmental psychologists recognized that when an individual begins life , we are all amoral or in other words , an individual do not yet have the rudiments of moral judgment . By the time an individual becomes adults , however , he /she may possess a complex notion of morality Morality is defined by most psychology books is a system of personal values and judgments about the fundamental rightness or wrongness of acts , and of an individual 's obligations to behave in just ways

that do not interfere with the rights of others . Moral development on the other hand , is the acquisition of moral standards and the ability to make judgments . But how do an individual evolve from amoral to moral , from a of right and wrong ? This question has occupied the attention of many developmental psychologists . The two most influential psychological researchers on moral development were Lawrence Kohlberg and Piaget as Kohlberg 's research on moral development was heavily influenced by Piaget`s cognitive development

According to Kohlberg , people progress through stages in the development of moral reasoning . I would like to choose the children , adolescence and adulthood emotional and moral-related life events and apply understanding of emotional and moral development

Moral development in Children . Piaget (1975 ) called the first period in a child 's moral development as moral realism . Before the age of seven or eight , the child has little concern for the reason that specific behaviors are allowed or forbidden he is a self-centered creature , and his mind does not seem flexible enough to fully comprehend the violation of rules as an interference with others (which theoretically , provides the basis for morality . Another label for the early moral realism period is the rules stage , a term that suggests that a child blindly follows rules without reason or unreasoning adherence to authority For Kohlberg , this stage of moral development is known as preconventional morality that is exemplified by most children at the preschool years (Fischer , 1993

Preconventional morality is a kind of self-serving approach to right and wrong where children tend to behave in certain ways in to avoid being punished and in certain ways to obtain rewards . In his longitudinal study of moral judgment , Kohlberg (1976 ) reinterviewed several children at different points in time . At age 8 , John , one of the participants , was asked , Why shouldn 't you steal from a store John 's preconventional response was : It 's not good to steal from the store . It 's against the law . Someone could see you and call the police (Kohlberg , 1976 . At this lowest level of moral development children have not internalized a personal code of morality . Rather they are molded by the standards of adult caregivers and the consequences of adhering to or rejecting these rules

Moral development during Adolescence . It is during early adolescence stage that a person 's sense of right and wrong typically matures to the level of conventional morality as Kohlberg calls it . Conventional morality...