Children’s Cognition On Positive Thinking And Its Influence Factors

Positive thinking refers to when a personal observes the good part of-things-with positive attitude during the cognitive process and performs with positive emotions and positive response.The researches of positive psychology have found that positive thinking can help with the development of emotions and improve personal happiness.The studies of children positive thinking have found that 5 to 6 year-old children are able to understand the relationship between emotions and thinking.They often use internal mental state to perceive negative emotions.Researchers have also found thatchildren will first realize that even in positive events,negative thinking can also bringpoor emotional experiences and then realize gradually positive thinking can improve the poor emotional experience brought by negative events.Based on the literature reviews,there are still questions:why 8 year-old children were more positive than 10 year-old children when producing emotions of positive thinking;why in neutral events children were more positive in predicting emotions of positive thinking;What are the factors that affect children positive thinking in addition to the age and event valence?Based on the above analysis,this paper earries out three researches to examine the cognition of children positive thinking and its influential factors.The first research investigated the age of children positive thinking by think aloud method.The participants were sixty children,whose age were four to six years old.The experiment materials were stories of positive event and negative event.Results showed most 5 years old children explained the reasons of emotion depending on the event itself.The 6 years old children considered the relations between emotion and their own mind(thought)and began to appear positive thinking explanations of the bud.The research 2A asked 5-to 11-year-old(N=400)listened to 6 illustrated scenarios featuring 2 characters that jointly experience the same positive event,negative event,or neutral event.Afterward,one character thinks a positive thought and the other thinks a negative thought.Children predicted and explained each character’s emotions.The experiment was performed by a 3x2x4 mixed design to examine the children’s cognition about positive thinking.Results showed Children age in 5,7 and 11 are more positive when predicting the emotion in positive events,less positive in neutral events and the least positive in negative events.All ages of children have more positive emotional feeling when predicting the positive thinking of the heroes in the story than when predicting the negative thinking of the heroes in the story.To a certain extent,positive thinking can improve the poor emotional experience brought by negative events.Five year-old children use more situation explanations,less use internal mental state explanations and have no thinking style explanations.On the contrary,11 year-old children use more internal mental state explanations and thinking style explanations.The research 2B’s participants were others 300 children and their parents in addition to 5 years old children of research 2A.The research examined the relation between the scores of child self-report measures,parent-report child measures,parent self-report measures and the emotion prediction of children.Results showed the optimism of children and children emotion prediction for positive event negative thinking ’s character was negative correlation significantly.The relations between the hope of children,the optimism and hope of children parents and children emotion prediction for negative event positive thinking’s character were positive correlation significantly.The research 3A-20 students aged between 10 to 14 years old for the formal interview-investigated the influence factors of children understanding of positive thinking and positive thinking through semi-structured interviews.Results showed that children understanding of positive thinking,including a positive mental attitude,positive coping and positive traits.Children think the main factors influencing positive thinking were parents’ personality characteristics and coping,family support and the perceptions of and responses of children themselves.The research 3B investigated the influence factors of parents’ positive thinking on children.The parents of 15 children with children were interviewed by semi structured interview.Results showed that parents think that the main factors affecting children positive thinking are parents’ optimistic state,the interaction between parent and child,children growth experience.According to the above research,the following conclusions are drawn.(1)To a certain extent,positive thinking can improve the poor emotional experience brought by negative events,but it is affected by age.With the growth of age,the subject has less situation explanations,increasing internal mental state explanations and thinking style explanations tend to rise.It indicated that the cognitive level of children’s positive thinking was rising continually.(2)Individual differences in child and parental optimism and hope predicted children cognition about some aspects of the relations on event-thought-emotion,including their beliefs about the emotional benefits of thinking positively in negative situations.Children and their parents are approved of the effects of parents’ optimism,parent-child interaction,the family environment and own upbringing of children on positive thinking,parent-child relationships and children resilience playing an important role.(3)The understanding of positive thinking from children contained the positive attitude in the cognitive level,the positive response in the behavioral level and the positive traits in the personality level.