Articles Person ¥ Context Effects on Anticipated Moral Emotions Following Aggression Sanna Roos, University of Turku, Christina Salmivalli, University of Turku and University of Stavanger and Ernest V. E. Hodges, St. John’s University Abstract We investigated person (sex, aggression level), context (witness type, victim reactions), and person ¥ context effects on children’s anticipated moral emotions following hypo- thetical acts of aggression against a peer. Children ( N = 378, mean age = 11.3 years) were presented a series of hypothetical vignettes in which the presence of witnesses (no witnesses/most liked classmates/all of the class) and victim’s reactions (neutral/ sad/ angry) were manipulated. The results indicated several person effects (e.g., girls anticipated more guilt and shame but less pride than boys; aggressiveness was related to less guilt and shame), as well as context effects (e.g., anticipated shame depended on who witnessed the situation and the emotional reactions of the victim). However, person ¥ context effects predominated.The overall pattern of results indicated that girls and low-aggressive children were more sensitive to contextual cues than boys and high- aggressive children.The findings support the importance of a person ¥ context approach to understanding the emotional reactions of different children in different situations. Keywords: moral emotions; contexts; aggression; person ¥ context interactions Introduction The cognitively complex self-conscious emotions are distinguished from basic emo- tions by their requirement of self-awareness and self-representations, as well as the absence of discrete, universally recognized facial expressions (Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, & Weiss, 1989; Tracy & Robins, 2007b). According to Tangney, Stuewig, and Mashek (2007), constant self-reflection and self-evaluation give rise to the valence and intensity of self-conscious emotions such that people both anticipate their likely emotional reactions as they consider behavioral alternatives and get emotional feed- back as a consequence of their actual behavior. Due to their ethical nature, self- conscious emotions are closely linked to moral emotions such as guilt, shame, and embarrassment, which, together with moral standards and moral cognitions, ultimately give rise to moral behavior (Tangney et al., 2007). Correspondence should be addressed to Sanna Roos, Department of Psychology, FIN-20014 Uni- versity of Turku, Finland. Email: sanna.roos@utu.fi doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9507.2011.00603.x © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.