Mary Louise Arnold’s research while affiliated with University of Toronto and other places

Jim (age 21): “My Mom’s father – my grandfather. A very independent guy, but a very caring guy. They (grandparents) go down to Florida every winter. And our family often goes down to spend some time with them. My grandpa really loves swimming in the ocean. So he would go out floating on his back for hours at a time…When I was younger, I used to stand on the shore and watch him float out. He would disappear and come back and ask me if I wanted to go out. I did once and people were worried because I was only ten. My parents and my grandma were concerned, ‘Oh, he’s too small,’ even though I was with my grandpa. But what he said to me stuck. What he said was I need to know my own limits, my abilities. Other people are going to have their opinions and worries and concerns, but being independent is taking that stuff into consideration, but then also doing what you can.”

Moral notions are foundational questions that have commanded deep reflection since antiquity, reflection that psychological science cannot evade, because the moral formation of children is a central concern of parents, schools, and communities charged with educating the next generation. In this respect there are few domains of study more crucial than moral psychology and few topics of greater importance than the development of moral self-identity, of moral character, and of the moral personality. This edited volume features the expertise of pre-eminent scholars in moral personality, self, and identity, such as moral philosophers, personality theorists, developmental psychologists, moral personality researchers, social psychologists, and neuroscientists. It brings together cutting-edge work in moral psychology that illustrates an impressive diversity of theoretical perspectives and methodologies and simultaneously points the way toward promising integrative possibilities.

In this longitudinal study, we compared family stories told by 32 Canadian adolescents at ages 16 and 20 about how parents and grandparents had taught them values. Relations to parents' and children's levels of generativity were also examined. Adolescents' stories of grandparent value teaching were less readily recalled and less interactive in their content compared with stories about parents. Stories of value teaching by more generative parents were more likely to involve specific episodes, to be more interactive, to be more likely to emphasize caring content, and to be less likely to have their message rejected by the teens. Similarly, when parents were more generative, adolescents' stories about grandparents' value teaching were also more likely to involve specific and interactive episodes. Finally, stories told about parents and grandparents that were more positive on these dimensions predicted higher generative concern scores for the adolescents themselves, measured subsequently at age 24. Adolescents' stories about parent and grandparent socialization in more generative family contexts thus have features that suggest a more compelling process of intergenerational value transmission.

This study examined the judgments and reasoning of adolescents (ages 12–19 years) from three sites in urban and rural China (n = 270) and in an urban Canadian comparison sample (n = 72), about the fairness of various forms of democratic and non-democratic government. Adolescents from both China and Canada preferred democratic forms of government, such as representative or direct democracy, to non-democratic systems, such as a meritocracy and an oligarchy of the wealthy, at all ages. Adolescents appealed to fundamental democratic principles, such as representation, voice, and majority rule, to justify their judgments. Similar age-related patterns in judgments and reasoning were found across cultures and across diverse settings within China.

Over the past 20 years, care reasoning has been increasingly recognised as an important aspect of moral development. Skoe has developed an interview measure of levels of care reasoning about the needs of self and other in relationships, the Ethic of Care Interview or ECI. In the present longitudinal research, we investigated developmental changes and family correlates of reasoning about care issues in a family study of 32 adolescents (aged 16 and then 20 years). There were no gender differences on the ECI for these adolescents, but there was a significant increase in scores over time. Care reasoning levels at age 20 were significant concurrent predictors of self-reported community involvement. Several parenting factors when children were age 16 (parents’ emphasis on caring as a goal in family stories, child reports of a more authoritative family parenting style, and parents’ use of more autonomy-encouraging practices) were associated with higher levels of care reasoning in adolescents at age 20, consistent with theoretical expectations.

This study explored the judgments and reasoning of Chinese adolescents (13-18 years of age) from 3 regions of mainland China (N = 574) regarding procedures for making decisions involving children in peer, family, and school contexts. Participants evaluated 2 democratic decision-making procedures (majority rule and consensus) and decision making by adult authorities for 2 decisions embedded in each social context. Judgments and reasoning about decision-making procedures varied by social context and by the decision under consideration, and evaluations of procedures became more differentiated with increasing age. The findings reveal that concepts of rights, individual autonomy, and democratic norms (majority rule) are salient aspects of Chinese adolescents' social reasoning and are used to evaluate critically existing social practices.

This longitudinal study focused on the level of optimism expressed in stories that mothers and fathers told about their adolescent children, and its relations to subsequent parenting practices. The investigation involved 35 families, focusing on adolescents aged 14 at Time 1 and 16 at Time 2, on average. Stories of an incident illustrating how the parent had taught values to the child were scored for two separate indices of optimism, overall tone of the narrative, and a focus on growth rather than control in socialization. As predicted, narrative optimism at Time 1 was generally associated at Time 2 with reports of more autonomy-granting to the child and with less punitiveness. This research provides supportive evidence for a construct of `parent optimism,' and indicates that it is reflected in meaningful ways in the stories that parents tell about family life and relationships.

Two studies used a narrative methodology to test the prediction that adolescents from more authoritative homes would exhibit greater responsiveness to parents’ views than would others. In Study 1, 51 Canadian adolescents in two age groups completed an interview to determine their levels of responsiveness to the parental voice in their narratives about advice from parents about specific decisions. Results showed a significant positive correlation between reports of an authoritative family parenting style and patterns of clearer appropriation of the parental voice as rated independently from students’ narratives. In Study 2, a sample of 184 Grade 12 students again showed a positive association between level of parent voice in stories and an authoritative family parenting style. In addition, a more advanced identity status was positively related to level of parent voice in stories, suggesting that a more sophisticated representation of both own and others’ voices may develop in concert.

Mothers, fathers, and their adolescent children participated in two studies investigating the relations between Erikson’s concept of generativity in adulthood and patterns of parenting. Study 1 involved 77 mothers and 48 fathers of 1st-year university students; Study 2 was part of an investigation of socialization processes in 35 families with an adolescent, aged 14–18. Parental generative concern was assessed by the Loyola Generativity Scale (LGS) of McAdams and de St. Aubin (1992) in each study. In both studies, mothers demonstrated positive relations between scores on the LGS and an authoritative style of parenting, as well as between generativity and more positive, optimistic views of adolescent developments. In Study 2, these more positive views in turn mediated some aspects of autonomy-fostering practices used with the adolescent. Variations in fathers’ levels of generative concern were less consistently related to these indices of parenting, however.