"There are no band-aids for emotions": The development of thinking about emotional harm.

An understanding of harm is central to social and cognitive development, but harm largely has been conceptualized as physical damage or injury. Less research focuses on children's judgments of harm to others' internal well-being (emotional harms). We asked 5- to 10-year-old children (N = 456, 50% girls, 50% boys; primarily tested in Central New York, with socioeconomic diversity, but limited racial/ethnic or linguistic diversity) to compare emotional and physical harms.

Crime but not punishment? Children are more lenient toward rule-breaking when the "spirit of the law" is unbroken.

Even early in development, children understand how rules work, and they harshly evaluate rule violators. Furthermore, we know that adults make nuanced evaluations about rule violations; in many situations, they believe that it can be acceptable to violate the technical language of a rule (the "letter of a rule") if doing so does not violate the reason why the rule was created (the "spirit of the rule"). Distinguishing between the letter and spirit of a rule is critical for a developed normative understanding.

Unskilled and Don't Want to Be Aware of It: The Effect of Self-Relevance on the Unskilled and Unaware Phenomenon.

Previous research found that poor performers tend to overestimate how well their performance compares to others'. This unskilled and unaware effect has been attributed to poor performers' lack of metacognitive ability to realize their ineptitude. We contend that the unskilled are motivated to ignore (be unaware of) their poor performance so that they can feel better about themselves.