The aim of the current study was to explore Chinese adolescent's social and moral transgressions and strategies for self-correction. For this study, following protocols that have been approved by an Institutional Review Board, 61 Chinese adolescents living in Guangzhou, distributed across three age groups: 10-11-year-olds (N=21, M age =11. 03, SD =.43), 12-13-year-olds (N= 20, M age =12.92, SD=.35), and 15-16-year-olds (N=20, M age =16.15, SD=.30), participated in one-on-one semi-structured interviews. The study employed a deductive analytical approach based on prior social domain research on children's and adolescents' transgressions and strategies for self-correction. This study found that Chinese youth reported conventional transgression events more frequently than any other domain. Moreover, many of adolescents' transgressions involved academic considerations, suggesting that how adolescents' time is organized and the social expectations for adolescent behavior influence the types of transgressions and justifications adolescents will make. Furthermore, participants reported developing self-correcting strategies following 73.6% of events, while 74.5% of strategies were reported to be developed by the adolescents themselves. Therefore, the findings suggest that there is room for adults to collaborate with adolescents in developing strategies to prevent future misbehavior and to encourage youth to not only be "good" or "moral," but to be and do better.
Compassion underlies kindness and as such, is important for creating harmonious societies. We examined children and adolescents' personal experiences of compassion and then how youth with different compassion profiles differed in their kindness (i.e., dispositional sympathy and prosocial behavior). An ethnically diverse sample of 8-, 11-, and 15-year-olds (N = 32; 66% girls) provided narratives of times they felt compassion. Next, in another diverse sample of 7-, 11-, and 15-year-olds (N = 168; 49% girls), we assessed youths' potential for global compassion (i.e., compassion that transcends intergroup boundaries) using a novel interview procedure. We also collected self- and caregiver-reports of dispositional sympathy and prosocial behavior. Youths' narratives revealed that youth often experienced compassion toward peers and relatives following both physical and psychological sufferance and often mentioned responding to the suffering other with helping behavior. On average, youth reported moderate levels of global compassion (i.e., compassion toward a suffering victimizer) and developmental trends revealed that 15-year-olds reported lower feelings of compassion than 11-year-olds. Next, latent profile analysis showed that compassion-oriented youth (i.e., youth who displayed moderate-high levels of global compassion) were rated as more prosocial than non-compassion-oriented youth (i.e., those who displayed low levels of global compassion). We discuss findings in relation to theory and research on the development of kindness in general and in intergroup contexts.

