Emotional Dissemblance Of Preschool Children: Behavioral Characteristics And Influencing Factors

Appropriate emotional expression plays a crucial role in the individual development ofsocial adaption and building of good interpersonal relationships. For a specific purpose insocial communication people may display a facial expression different from their real emotion.This skill called emotional dissemblance is the manifestation of emotional socialization and isgradually acquired when one grows up, especially in the time of preschool. Studying thebehavior characteristics and influencing factors of preschool children’s emotionaldissemblance contributes to furthering the research field such as emotional adjustment,emotional expression and emotional socialization, all offering a good theoretical guide toearly emotional education.The present research reviewed both the theoretical and empirical studies of emotionaldissemblance from aspects of concepts, methods, preconditions and influencing factors,explored preschoolers’ behavior characteristics of emotional dissemblance and the effect ofinhibitory control, theory of mind, understanding of emotional display rules on emotionaldissemblance by the context experiment and interviewing method, then discussed the innermechanism of preschool children’s emotional dissemblance behavior.The research had three parts. The first part was the basic study to investigate Chinesepreschoolers’ cognitive and behavior developing of emotional dissemblance using thedisappointing gift paradigm. The second part verified Saarni’s four components theory with aseries of stroop tasks, measures of theory of mind and distinguishing the appearance-realemotion, including the relationship between inhibitory control, theory of mind, understandingof emotional display rules and preschool children’s emotional dissemblance. The final partwas the research of influencing mechanism. This part inspected how motivation influencedpreschool children’s emotional dissemblance. And then analyze thoroughly the influence thatthe four factors above had on the acquisition of emotional dissemblance behavior.The results showed that：(1) Preschool children’s behavior and cognition of emotionaldissemblance developed with the age increasing especially in4to5years old. The genderdifference was found in both the facial expression and the verbal dissemblance, where moreelder girls passed the measuring tasks than the little ones whereas the elder boys seemlyperformed the same as the younger;(2) Three kinds of Preschoolers’ abilities of inhibitorycontrol, theory of mind and understanding of emotional display rules which were significantlyrelevant to emotional dissemblance improved with the increasing age;(3) Preschool childrenwere more inclined to behave the emotional dissemblance in the self-protect motive conditionthan the pro-social motive;(4) Preschool children’s inhibitory control, theory of mind, understanding of emotional display rules and motivation were the preconditions for thebehavior of emotional dissemblance while the motivation served as the mediator in theinfluence which the previous three kinds of mental abilities had on the individual behavior ofemotional dissemblance.