Developmental Multimodal Ethics Understanding in Children's Narrative Media: A Neurocognitively Grounded Framework for Creative Practice

This work proposes a unified, neurocognitively grounded framework for understanding how children interpret ethical meaning in narrative media through multimodal channels such as prosody, colour, music, gesture, and spatial framing. Integrating findings from developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, social cognition, and evolutionary theory, the framework demonstrates that young children access an “ethical core” of narrative situations long before they can articulate propositional explanations. The paper further shows how ensemble-cast structures and team-based dynamics provide multiple identification pathways across developmental stages, enabling narratives to achieve broad, multigenerational engagement. By analyzing the structural continuity between children’s narrative comprehension and adult sociopolitical reasoning, the work argues that many forms of conflict—interpersonal, group-based, or geopolitical—share a common underlying architecture that is elaborated through culturally specific representational “decorations.” The framework offers practical implications for creators, educators, and researchers by explaining why multimodal design, character diversity, and cooperative narrative structures reliably support ethical understanding, emotional resonance, and long-term audience investment. It provides a theoretically integrated foundation for narrative design that aligns creative intuition with established scientific evidence.