Darcia's homepage at the Department of Psychology at Notre Dame University featuring an overview of her curriculum and research

A good overview of Darcia's publications by citation

Many podcast interviews

Website of the Evolved Nest project

Social outcomes, such as empathy, conscience, and behavioral self-regulation, might require a baseline of psychological wellbeing. According to Triune Ethics Metatheory (TEM), early experience influences the neuropsychology underlying a child's orientation toward the social and moral world. Theoretically, a child's wellbeing, fostered through early caregiving, promotes sociomoral temperaments that correspond to the child's experience, such as social approach or withdrawal in face-to-face situations. These temperaments may represent an individual's default sociomoral perspective on the world. We hypothesized that sociomoral temperament emerges as a function of wellbeing and would be related to social outcomes measured by moral socialization and self-regulation. Further, we hypothesized that sociomoral temperament would mediate the relationship between wellbeing and social outcomes.

There are over 7.5 billion people on the earth. Some people take it as a sign of evolutionary success. But imagine if at the next birthday party you attend, the tallest person took everything --all the cake, punch and presents for himself. It would not be much of a party. Similarly, when one species takes over a biocommunity for itself, it’s not much of a community. This is what the dominant industrialized capitalist culture has done on the earth. This dominant culture is behaving like a weed species. Weed species appear for a while but they disappear when a more cooperative species comes along that fosters the wellbeing of the biocommunity (Naess & Rothenberg, 1989). The dominant human culture has won the species race, its apparent aim with its propaganda of human separation from and superiority to Nature (Moore, 2016). Only there is no race. And it has been lost. 

Phronesis or practical wisdom is an idea often presumed to have emerged from the ancient Greeks and thus discussions tend to focus on their views. Yet practical wisdom was not just the purview of ancient Greek thought but was discussed among Axial age philosophies (e.g., Confucius), and it is apparent, though not transcribed, in ancestral-style societies (noncivilized) ( Lee and Daly 2005 ) and among First Nation peoples of the Americas (e.g., Deloria 2006 ). The perspective presented here suggests that, perhaps because of inadequate attention to these other traditions, there are gaps in most scholarly discussions of phronesis. The latter traditions include two critical ingredients of phronesis not typically attended to in discussions of ancient Greek traditions: the grounding or biosocial ecology of development and the expansive imagination or worldview of transpersonal transrationality

Rest and Narvaez developped the four component of model of moral development. This model included moral sensitivity, moral judgment, moral motivation, and moral character. Based on this model, when making a decision, we must ensure that we take into consideration not only how this decision will affect us but also have the sensitivity to understand how this decision will impact others. Second, we must have enough knowledge of the subject to understand if the decision, in the context of the subject, is a "right." Third, we must have the internal motivation to follow through and, finally, have the character to do what we have determined is correct.

Kohlberg’s work in moral judgement has been criticised by many philosophers and psychologists. Building on Kohlberg’s core assumptions, we propose a model of moral judgement (hereafter the neo-Kohlbergian approach) that addresses these concerns. Using 25 years of data gathered with the Defining Issues Test (DIT), we present an overview of Minnesota’s neo-Kohlbergian approach, using Kohlberg’s basic starting points, ideas from Cognitive Science (especially schema theory), and developments in moral philosophy.

In this chapter we explore the resources of social-cognitive theory to conceptualize moral personality. In our view social-cognitive theory is an important source of insights for understanding moral functioning, although it is rarely invoked for this purpose. Indeed, the introduction of social-cognitive theory to the moral domain has at least three integrative possibilities (Lapsley & Narvaez, in press). First, it opens moral psychology to the theories, constructs, and methodological tactics of social-personality research, with its potential for yielding powerful accounts of character, identity, and personality. Second, it opens a broader array of options for conceptualizing moral rationality, including the possibility that much of our moral functioning is tact, implicit, and automatic (Narvaez & Lapsley, in press). Third, it locates the study of moral functioning within a mainstream of psychological research on cognition, memory, social cognition, and modern information-processing.

The Minnesota Community Voices and Character Education Project (CVCE) was a collaborative project among researchers and educators that provided both a systematic and holistic view of character as a set of skills, in accordance with ancient and modern views, and a novice-to-expert view of character cultivation. The model provided maximum flexibility for local implementation while using rigorous evaluation methods in measuring effects. An overview of the project is presented, including the research-based framework and the evaluation of program outcomes.

Debating whether or not teachers should teach values addresses the wrong question. Education already is a values-infused enterprise. The larger question is how to train teachers for positive character formation. Two teacher education strategies are presented in this article. A “minimalist” strategy requires teacher educators to make explicit the hidden moral education curriculum and to reveal the inextricable linkage between best practice instruction and moral character outcomes. The “maximalist” approach requires preservice teachers to master a tool kit of pedagogical strategies that target moral character directly as a curricular goal. To this end, the Integrative Ethical Education model outlines five steps for moral character development: supportive climate, ethical skills, apprenticeship instruction, self-regulation, and adopting a developmental systems approach.

In recent years “flourishing” has been a topic of interest to multiple fields, particularly economics (eg measuring well-being;  philosophy and psychology. We hope the papers in this special section will inspire you to expand your understandings of flourishing, inclusive of different perspectives. I make some preliminary remarks with a few distinctions and suggest a definition according to appropriate baselines, a definition that brings into the circle of concern non-humans.

In the past century, both philosophy and psychology have reawakened to virtue, but mostly independently. How can the disciplines integrate their approaches to virtue scholarship? We examine three key assertions from virtue ethics in light of empirical research in psychology:(1) that virtue is realized in habits and dispositions,(2) that virtue is realized by a mean between extremes (doctrine of the mean), and (3) that virtue relates to human flourishing and the telos. We discuss selected contemporary psychological programs–structural examinations of personality, expertise, and developmental studies–and consider their strengths and limitations in light of philosophical concerns and as they relate to virtue generally and specifically in science. We finish by suggesting areas for future fruitful inquiry at the intersection of virtue ethics and psychology.

Recently, intuitionist theories have been effective in capturing the academic discourse about morality. Intuitionist theories, like rationalist theories, offer important but only partial understanding of moral functioning. Both can be fallacious and succumb to truthiness: the attachment to one’s opinions because they "feel right," potentially leading to harmful action or inaction. Both intuition and reasoning are involved in deliberation and expertise. Both are malleable from environmental and educational influence, making questions of normativity—which intuitions and reasoning skills to foster—of utmost importance. Good intuition and reasoning inform mature moral functioning, which needs to include capacities that promote sustainable human well-being. Individual capacities for habituated empathic concern and moral metacognition—moral locus of control, moral self-regulation, and moral self-reflection—comprise mature moral functioning, which also requires collective capacities for moral dialogue and moral institutions. These capacities underlie moral innovation and are necessary for solving the complex challenges humanity faces.

The language of moral virtue comes easily to most of us. When we think about the moral, what comes to mind are certain dispositions to do the right thing at the right time for the right reason. We have in mind the possession of certain traits that conduce to living the life that is good for one to live. To be honest, generous, fair-minded, compassionate, resolute in the service of justice—these and other virtues are the ambition that we have for ourselves and for our children. Indeed, how to raise children of good moral character is a pressing concern of parents and educators alike. We hope children come to exhibit traits of character that are praiseworthy and reflect credibly on their formation as a person. Indeed, we would be disappointed if our children developed only a glancing acquaintance with the virtues.

This paper describes the development and preliminary testing of an intermediate concept measure (ICM) of moral thinking for adolescent populations. First proposed by Rest and Narvaez (1994), intermediate concepts are described as more context specific than moral stages defined within the Kohlberg tradition, but are more abstract than assessments of codes of conduct. The process of developing the adolescent ICM is described and data are presented to provide initial support for the measure. Results indicate that the adolescent ICM can distinguish age educational groups across high school and individuals who are acting out in school achieved significantly lower scores than all other students. In addition, ICM scores are related to Defining Issues Test scores providing preliminary support for the claim that both measures assess the moral domain. Coupled with the respectable psychometric properties of the measure, these findings support the adolescent ICM as a measure of moral thinking in adolescent populations and as a potential outcome measure for character education programmes.

The just community approach aims to promote moral development and moral responsibility through the organization, practices and culture of the school itself. The just community approach to schools emerged in 1974 with the opening of the Cluster School, a small school-within-a-school located in Cambridge Massachusetts. Out of this experiment and others that followed, Kohlberg, co-authors, Oser, Lind, and other colleagues, as well as the teachers and students within the different just community programs themselves developed the just community approach to moral education as we have it today.

This article introduces a special section on moral development. We claim that the field is now undergoing a resurgence of theoretical and methodological innovation after the eclipse of paradigmatic moral stage theory. Although research on prosocial development, moral emotions, and social domain theory has sustained interest in moral development, recent additional trends have contributed to its resurgence. This includes research in neuroscience, sociobiology, and social psychology; broad interest in moral-character education and virtues; and the appearance of recent handbooks and special journal issues. We review 3 broad possible future themes (early development, self and personality, and culture) of moral development research and introduce a set of new contributions in this special section as examples. (

This paper provides a brief overview of Rest's (1983) conception of the important processes that contribute to effective moral decision making, summarizes efforts to design and assess moral education programs based on Rest's Four-Component Model, and describes new directions in the assessment of moral judgment development that are specifically directed toward professional ethics education. Based on preliminary studies, we recommend that, in addition to measuring each of the processes in Rest's model, educators design profession-specific measures of moral concepts that better reflect the content of professional ethics education. Labeled intermediate concepts measures, these assessments attend to concepts that are more specific than the abstract moral schemas tested by Kohlbergian measures of moral judgment and more general than concrete codes of professional ethics.

Jean William Fritz Piaget (9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology". Piaget placed great importance on the education of children. As the Director of the International Bureau of Education, he declared in 1934 that "only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual". His theory of child development is studied in pre-service education programs. Educators continue to incorporate constructivist-based strategies.

Piaget's theory of cognitive development is a comprehensive theory about the nature and development of human intelligence. It was originated by the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980). The theory deals with the nature of knowledge itself and how humans gradually come to acquire, construct, and use it. Piaget's theory is mainly known as a developmental stage theory. He believed that children of different ages made different mistakes because of the "quality rather than quantity" of their intelligence. Piaget proposed four stages to describe the development process of children: sensorimotor stage, pre-operational stage, concrete operational stage, and formal operational stage. Each stage describes a specific age group. In each stage, he described how children develop their cognitive skills. For example, he believed that children experience the world through actions, representing things with words, thinking logically, and using reasoning.

Lawrence Kohlberg (October 25, 1927 – January 19, 1987) was an American psychologist best known for his theory of stages of moral development. He served as a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago and at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. Even though it was considered unusual in his era, he decided to study the topic of moral judgment, extending Jean Piaget's account of children's moral development from 25 years earlier. In fact, it took Kohlberg five years before he was able to publish an article based on his views. Kohlberg's work reflected and extended not only Piaget's findings but also the theories of philosophers George Herbert Mead and James Mark Baldwin. At the same time he was creating a new field within psychology: "moral development".

The Heinz dilemma is a frequently used example in many ethics and morality classes. One well-known version of the dilemma, used in Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development, is stated as follows: A woman was on her deathbed. There was one drug that the doctors said would save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: “No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it.” So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's laboratory to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

Carol Gilligan (November 28, 1936) is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist, best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships. Gilligan is a professor of Humanities and Applied Psychology at New York University and was a visiting professor at the Centre for Gender Studies and Jesus College at the University of Cambridge until 2009. She is known for her book In a Different Voice (1982), which criticized Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development.

Martin Elias Peter Seligman (born August 12, 1942) is an American psychologist, educator, and author of self-help books. Seligman is a strong promoter within the scientific community of his theories of well-being and positive psychology. His theory of learned helplessness is popular among scientific and clinical psychologists. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Seligman as the 31st most cited psychologist of the 20th century. Seligman is the Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Psychology. He was previously the Director of the Clinical Training Program in the department, and earlier taught at Cornell University. He is the director of the university's Positive Psychology Center. Seligman was elected president of the American Psychological Association for 1998. He is the founding editor-in-chief of Prevention and Treatment (the APA electronic journal) and is on the board of advisers of Parents magazine.

The vagus nerve, also known as the tenth cranial nerve, cranial nerve X, or simply CN X, is a cranial nerve that carries sensory fibers that create a pathway that interfaces with the parasympathetic control of the heart, lungs, and digestive tract. It comprises two nerves—the left and right vagus nerves—but they are typically referred to collectively as a single subsystem. The vagus is the longest nerve of the autonomic nervous system in the human body and comprises both sensory and motor fibers. The sensory fibers originate from neurons of the nodose ganglion, whereas the motor fibers come from neurons of the dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus and the nucleus ambiguus. The vagus was also historically called the pneumogastric nerve.

In psychology and cognitive science, a schema (pl: schemata or schemas) describes a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them. It can also be described as a mental structure of preconceived ideas, a framework representing some aspect of the world, or a system of organizing and perceiving new information, such as a mental schema or conceptual model. Schemata influence attention and the absorption of new knowledge: people are more likely to notice things that fit into their schema, while re-interpreting contradictions to the schema as exceptions or distorting them to fit. Schemata have a tendency to remain unchanged, even in the face of contradictory information. Schemata can help in understanding the world and the rapidly changing environment. People can organize new perceptions into schemata quickly as most situations do not require complex thought when using schema, since automatic thought is all that is required.

Reflective equilibrium is a state of balance or coherence among a set of beliefs arrived at by a process of deliberative mutual adjustment among general principles and particular judgements. Although he did not use the term, philosopher Nelson Goodman introduced the method of reflective equilibrium as an approach to justifying the principles of inductive logic (this is now known as Goodman's method). The term reflective equilibrium was coined by John Rawls and popularized in his A Theory of Justice as a method for arriving at the content of the principles of justice.

The Minnesota Community Voices and Character Education Project (CVCE) was a collaborative project among researchers and educators that provided both a systematic and holistic view of character as a set of skills, in accordance with ancient and modern views, and a novice-to-expert view of character cultivation. The model provided maximum flexibility for local implementation while using rigorous evaluation methods in measuring effects. An overview of the project is presented, including the research-based framework and the evaluation of program outcomes. Multivariate analysis of variance was conducted on gain scores from pre-post student assessments of climate and individual variables, comparing program schools with a comparison school. Results were significant for program schools who implemented with more breadth and focus.

Implicate order and explicate order are ontological concepts for quantum theory coined by theoretical physicist David Bohm during the early 1980s. They are used to describe two different frameworks for understanding the same phenomenon or aspect of reality. In particular, the concepts were developed in order to explain the bizarre behaviors of subatomic particles which quantum physics describes and predicts with elegant precision but struggles to explain. In Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order, he used these notions to describe how the appearance of such phenomena might appear differently, or might be characterized by, varying principal factors, depending on contexts such as scales. The implicate (also referred to as the "enfolded") order is seen as a deeper and more fundamental order of reality. In contrast, the explicate or "unfolded" order includes the abstractions that humans normally perceive

The toll in death, suffering, and displacement caused by conflicts engaging groups defined by ethnicity, nationality, religion, or other social identities has reached staggering proportions over the past decade. With expertise in research and intervention, psychologists have critical contributions to make to more fully understanding and more effectively confronting this distressing global phenomenon. The authors focus on the parallels between the core beliefs of individuals and the collective worldviews of groups that may operate to trigger or constrain violent struggles. On the basis of a review of relevant literatures, 5 belief domains--superiority, injustice, vulnerability, distrust, and helplessness--are identified as particularly important for further study.

In designing a recent study, Notre Dame Professor of Psychology Darcia Narvaez wanted to test the possibility of promoting the sense of ecological attachment that was inherently part of many pre-industrialized societies and is still practiced by First Nation peoples. An experiment that was part of the study, now published in Ecopsychology, showed that students reported increased mindfulness towards the environment after performing ecological attachment tasks like contemplating nature, or practicing environmental preservation tasks like recycling and limiting electricity usage. Only the tasks that had students communing with nature increased feelings of connection to it.