From obligation-dominant to guilt-dominant: the asymmetrical development of indebtedness in Chinese mid-childhood children

Upon receiving favors, adults can experience not only gratitude but also the negative feeling of indebtedness. Indebtedness is comprised of the guilt for burdening others and the sense of obligation to repay, which are derived from the appraisals about the benefactor's communal- and exchange-oriented intentions and in turn reinforce corresponding relationships with the benefactor. Yet, from the perspective of ontogeny, how the two components of indebtedness develop and how these developments contribute to children's social functions (e.g., peer relationship preferences) remain unclear. Here, we developed a favor-exchange interpersonal game to systematically investigate Chinese mid-childhood (6–12 years) children's appraisals of the benefactor's intentions, feelings of indebtedness, and peer relationship preferences when receiving help from communal benefactors who did not expect repayment or from exchange benefactors who expected repayment. Two experiments convergingly demonstrated that the development of indebtedness undergoes a transformation from obligation-dominant to guilt-dominant in emotional responses, appraisal-emotion associations and emotion-behavior associations: first, the self-reported sense of obligation and its contribution to indebtedness decreased as age increased, while the self-reported guilt and its contribution to indebtedness increased; second, with age, participants reported higher guilt and lower obligation when perceiving communal intentions from the benefactor; and third, as age increased, participants were more likely to become friends with the benefactor out of the feeling of guilt rather than the sense of obligation, resulting in their increased preferences for communal benefactors. This study extends our understanding of the adaptive functions of indebtedness and its potential contributions to peer relationship preferences.