Happy victimizing

Bryan Sokol points out that the earliest demonstration in which young children ascribed wrongdoers positive emotions was provided in 1980 by Barden, Zelko, Duncan, and Masters. In their test, they provided 40 hypothetical situations and asked subjects to predict one of the selected affective reactions ("happy", "scared", "sad", etc.) They singled out an observation that the situation "dishonesty (not caught)" was predicted by the youngest children to produce the "happy" emotion, while in the oldest group the consensus was for "fear". A more detailed report, frequently cited as pioneering, was that of Nunner-Winkler and Sodian (1988). In an effort to clarify the nature of young children's morality, they conducted a certain experiment and reported that most 4-year-olds attributed positive moral emotions to the wrongdoer focusing on the successful outcome of the wrongdoer's action, while 8-year-olds focused on the moral value of the wrongdoer's action and therefore attributed him negative feelings.