Practical experience versus formal instruction in the moral field during adolescence: The role of the emotions

An increasing corpus of researches from different fields of psychology highlights the main role of emotions in the resolution of different tasks where reasoning is linked to a moral conflict resolution. In our study we evaluate the expression of basic and moral emotions in two groups of Italian adolescents that were exposed to moral issues in different environments and situations. We tested a group of adolescents (N=69; mean age=13,3) that followed a structured school program in moral and social education and another group of adolescents (N=73; mean age=14,4) that was involved in practical activities as volunteers in social community services without a formal instruction on moral issues. In the Italian society it's quiet absent a relationship between a forma school course on ethical issues and a practical experience in the social help/care field; the service learning practice is still missing in the Italian schools. We tested the two groups of adolescents using a questionnaire (70 items) in order to evaluate different constructs linked to basic and moral emotions. Before the questionnaire administration, all the subjects read a short story about a moral dilemma regarding a common school situation: the aggression from a group of students against an innocent scholar. All the questionnaire items were answered on a 6-interval Likert scale, all the subjects had 1 hour and 30 minutes to fill the questionnaire. The two groups data were compared by an analysis of variance (ANOVA). Results show that, in the different perspectives offered by the questionnaire (victim and aggressor role taking), the adolescents involved in social care activities as volunteers reached higher levels of basic emotions (sadness, anger) and moral emotions (loyalty, guilt, pride) than the group of adolescents that followed courses on moral issues without a practical experience on this field.