• The Korean Journal of Community Living Science
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.169-180
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• 2009

This study was performed to examine the emotion expectations and explanations of four participants(an actor, a recipient, a child observer, and an adult observer) in moral, social-conventional, and personal rule transgression situations. Six vignettes describing the rule transgressions were presented to 200 children who were either five or seven years old. The children were asked to predict and explain each participant's emotions. The children's emotion expectations were different depending on the domain of the rule transgressions and on the type of the participant. The actors were predicted to feel happy during all transgressions, while the recipients and two observers(a child and an adult) were predicted to feel unhappy. The seven-year-old children attributed more happiness to the actors, and more negative affect to the recipients compared to the five-year-olds. This result was inconsistent with the previous findings that older children attributed more happiness to actors. This finding was discussed in relation to the 'happy victimizer'. Some categories of emotion explanations were differentiated according to the domain of rule transgressions. The personal rule transgressions, newly defined and examined in this study, were judged to be less serious than the moral rule transgressions in terms of the intensity of the negative affect.