Abstract
This study examined the relationship between children’s moral judgments about pretend crying and their understanding of mental states. Thirty-three 6-year-old Japanese children were individually given pretend crying tasks involving a “harm” story and a “harm-free” story, theory of mind tasks, hidden emotion tasks, and a vocabulary test. In the harm story, the protagonist pretended to cry after accidentally being bumped by another character. In the harm-free story, the protagonist pretended to cry because of a purely personal motivation. The results showed that understanding of hidden emotions was correlated with negative judgments about the pretend crying in the harm story, whereas theory of mind was correlated with negative judgments in the harm-free story. The interface between social understanding and morality is discussed.
