Adolescent Emotions: Development, Morality, and Adaptation: New Directions for Youth Development, Number 136

Emotions shape our social lives. They play an influential role in how young people evaluate morally relevant situations such as conflicts about fairness, justice, and social inclusion and exclusion. Feelings of empathy or guilt can help adolescents understand the difference between moral concerns, such as fairness, and amoral concerns, such as personal gains or peer group functioning. Such feelings can also serve as motives for prosocial behavior and can inhibit antisocial behavior. Still, young people’s
emotional experiences in morally relevant situations are complex and do not necessarily lead to moral choices or adaptive social behavior.

This volume examines the question of how emotions relate to adolescents’ decision making, reasoning, and behavior in morally relevant situations. It provides a summary of current research on emotions, morality, and adaptive behaviors. Furthermore, it discusses new approaches to research on emotions, morality, and socially adaptive behavior in adolescence. By doing so, the articles provide new insights into adolescents’ emotional and moral development and show how emotions contribute to the way
adolescents negotiate, resolve, and adapt to the moral and social conflicts that inevitably occur in their everyday lives.

By integrating innovative perspectives from developmental, educational, and clinical research, this volume has much to offer for researchers, youth practitioners, and educators.

Tina Malti is a German Palestinian developmental and clinical psychologist. She is a full professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and founding director of the Laboratory for Social-Emotional Development and Intervention.