Join Antonella Guadagnino in examining how children learn moral distinctions between different nonhuman animals through everyday family practices.

Drawing on qualitative interviews with parents in multispecies households, Antonella highlights how speciesism is not transmitted as a fixed belief system, but emerges through situational and adaptive socialization. Parents navigate ethical tensions around care, food consumption, and emotional attachment by selectively framing animals as companions, commodities, or ecological actors, often in ways that preserve both children’s empathy and parents’ own self-concept as caring moral agents. The findings highlight how species-based moral boundaries are constructed, negotiated, and made emotionally livable within ordinary family life, with implications for understanding how moral concern for nonhuman animals develops across childhood. Click on the URL or use the QR code to join.

Antonella Guadagnino is a Ph.D. candidate in Cognitive & Comparative Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center whose work examines human-animal relations, including how moral attitudes toward nonhuman animals are shaped through everyday socialization within families. She is also a researcher at the College of Staten Island, where her work focuses on understanding social behavior in captive naked mole-rats to inform evidence-based improvements in animal welfare and research practices.