Adolescents' social judgments and emotion attributions about exclusion in three contexts, nationality, gender, and personality, were measured in a sample of 12- and 15-year-old Swiss and non-Swiss adolescents (N = 247). Overall, adolescents judged exclusion based on nationality as less acceptable than exclusion based on gender or personality. Non-Swiss participants, however, who reflected newly immigrated children to Switzerland, viewed exclusion based on nationality as more wrong than did Swiss participants and attributed more positive emotions to the excluder than did Swiss participants. Girls viewed exclusion in nationality and personality contexts as less legitimate than did boys, and they attributed less positive emotions to excluder target in the nationality context than did boys. The findings extend existing research on exclusion by focusing on both emotion attributions as well as judgments and by investigating exclusion in a sample that included a recent immigrant group.
© 2011 The Authors. Child Development © 2011 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.