The Influence Of Different Emotion Quality On The Theory Of Mind In University Students

Theory of mind(ToM)learning has been the focus of the development of psychology research. The subjects have been involved in all stages of life development, research paradigms and methods are constantly changing, research perspective shift from the special groups to the normal groups, and more and more researchs pay more attention to the potential relationship between theory of mind and other psychological function, also very concerned about the differences between and among research.A comprehensive literature review was made on the important empirical findings in the present study. On the basis of analysis from the previous studies, three studies were present.In study 1,we administered five kinds of ToM tasks (10 stories) and investigated the develpment of 150 university students' ability of theory of mind.According to the results,we selected four kinds of ToM tasks (8 stories)which more effectively in the invstigation.In study 2, we selected 90 pictures from Chinese Affective Picture System(CAPS) .Experiments found these pictures were able to wake up university students'emotion, the materials are effective. In study 3, we used the ToM tasks to measure 72 university students' ToM level.Four weeks later,we remeasure it after subjects'emotion aroused in the laboratory,to study the impact of emotion on the theory of mind in university students.The main conclusion are as follows:(1)The white lie story task have ceiling effect, not suitable for university student'ToM test.The double emotion story, the story comprehension, the double deception story and false belief story can be use for investigate the university students' abiliy of theory of mind.(2)University students'ToM has developed an initial maturity level, but still developing. There were no significant main effect of grade in the total score and each task score; femal students perfromed better than male students at the overall level of theory of mind;in the dual story task, the female students was significantly better than male students. (3)The development of three components(emotion, cognitive, intent)in theory of mind is not synchronized, the emotion development is the most mature component, followed by the cognitive and the intent. Higher grades students'emotion score were significantly better than lower grades.(4)Compared the development of theory of mind, the science students perfromed a little better than arts students, but not have significant differences. In the dual emotional story task and the story comprehension task, the science students performed better than arts students; in the double deception story and false belief task, the science students performed better than arts students. There were no significant in general level between undergraduate students and graduate students.In the double emotional story task,graduate students were better than undergraduate students.(5)The emotional pictures selected from CAPS have obvious effect in emotional arousal .(6)Different emotion have significant influence to the score of theory of mind,positive emotion contribute to the improvement of theory of mind; negative emotion inhibited the performce of theory of mind. The ability of Theory of Mind has significant main effect. For the high and low theory of mind, emotional impact is not the same size. Those with high levels of theory of mind greatly influenced by negative emotion, those with low level theory of mind greatly influenced by positive emotion and neutral emotion.