The Children's Developmental Difference Of Guilt Emotion And Basic Emotions

Emotion development plays a very important role in the children's socialization, which is a important content in the development of children's sociality. Emotion was regarded as a subsidiary psychological process and an interference factor of human activity in the initial and mid-twentith century, becaurse of the influence of behaviourism and cognitive psychology. The researchers changed their view about emotion with the development of emotion studies. In development psychology domain, emotion is seen as dynamic core of continuous development of individual. Now, the study of children's emotion development played an important role in development psychology.The extant literature on emotion development focused on the mechanism of emotion development, the development of emotion expression, the development of emotion unstanding and the development of emotion regulation. However, most of these studies payed more attention to the basic emotions, which neglected the important kind of emotions---the self-conscious emotions. The present research will focus on the guilt emotion (one of self-conscious emotions) and the basic emotion. A series of experiments were designed to study the developmental difference and the difference of cognitive processing between guilt emotion and the basic emotions by the experimental method, questionnaire method, clinical enterviewing method and ERP technique. The whole dissertation included three parts.In the first part of the dissertation, a review on the children's emotion development, self-conscious emotions and guilt emotion was presented. We focused on the differences between the self-conscious emotions and the basic emotions, the research status of self-conscious emotions and guilt emotion. Based on these analyses, the theory hypothesis and the research assumption were brought forward.The second part consists of a series of studies, which focused on the development difference and the difference of cognitive processing between guilt emotion and the basic emotions. The first two studies involved about the development difference between guilt and the basic emotions by clinical interviewing method, the effect of children's guilit emotion and sad emotion on their prosocial behaviors by the field study method. The third study explored the difference of cognitive processing between guilt emotion and the basic emotion by the exprimental method, on the basis of the affective priming paradigm. The last one made a primary research in the neural mechanism about the difference of cognitive processing between guilt emotion and the basic emotions. The results are showed as following:(1) the pupils displayed better ability of unstanding of the basic emotions than guilt emotion. the1year pupils unstanded the basic emotions well, and they kept the better ability in primary school. the pupils'understanding ability of guilt emotion kept on increasing with age, and was toward to their unstanding ability of the basic emotions gradually.(2) compared to interpersonal communication situation, the pupils displayed better abilty of understanding guilt in the study situation. the first to three grade is the rapid growth of pupils' understanding of guilt and the3year and5year pupils displayed the better ability of unstanding guilt in the study situation.(3) there was difference effect on the children's prosocial behaviors between sad emotion and guilt emotion, the children's prosocial behaviors wouldn't be increased if they feel sad, when they feel guilt, their prosocial behaviors would be increased.(4) the children would emerge different emotion when they pad attention to the different aspect, if they pay attention to their own bad result, they would feel sad, but if they pay attention to bad effect of their own behaviors on the group, they would feel guilt.(5) the children had different cognitive process between guilt emotion and the basic emtions. the children payed more cognitive resources to guilt emotion, and the mental processing of guilt emotion must be in the states of consciousness. the children's prosocial behaviors would be increased when guilt emotion would be primed. however, the mental processing of the basic emotions could be in the states of consciousness and unconsciousness. when the basic emotion would be primed, in the state of unconsciousness, children would produce prosocial behaviors more quickly, but children's prosocial behaviors were less in the state of consciousness.(6) from the ERP, there were difference in the advanced cognitive process between the basic emotions and guilt emotion. children payed more mental resources to the survival negative basic emotions, and this tendency was most obvious in the left brain. there was different developmental trend in the early process of the basic emotions and guilt emotion between boys and girls. for boys, the survival negative basic emotions were processed more quickly in the early process, and there was no difference in the mental resources among the different emotions and in the active orientation. however, the social emotions were processed more quickly in the early process by girls, and they would face to the basic emotions more and pay more attention to the basic emoitons.The third part of the dissertation was a general discussion of the whole research. Based on the results of this research and others, the author demonstrated the developmental difference of guilt emotion and the basic emotions, the different effect on the prosocial behaviors and the different cognitive process between this two kinds of emotions. At last, the author analyzed the value and problem of this research and pointed out the future direction of such research.