A Study On The Development Of Primary School Children's Emotional Cognition

Preschoolers are at the beginning of emotional cognition development. According to the life-span perspective, children's emotional cognition will keep developing after the preschool period. This study explored how primary school children's emotional cognition develops during their grown-up through 3 kinds of experiments.In experiment 1, we collected compositions of 210 children (from grade 2 to grade 6) which deal with an emotional event to simply analyze how pupils know about emotion.In experiment 2, 60 subjects of grade2, grade4 and grade 6 were randomly drawn out. We gave them 5 stories (selected according to experiment 1 and similar studies) which stand for 5 kinds of emotions. 4 questions (which are about recognizing the emotion, knowledge about the reason of emotion, knowledge about behaviors of emotion and knowledge of emotion regulation) were given per story. Every story included an emotion expresser and an emotion recipient.In experiment 3, 59 subjects (18 pupils in grade2, 21 pupils in grade 4 and 20 pupils in grade 6) were randomly drawn out. In this experiment 80 couples of emotional words were used. These words included 4 kinds of emotion and 3 sub-emotional cognitions (Knowledge about the reason of emotion, knowledge about behaviors of emotion and knowledge about emotion regulation).We recorded subjects' reaction time (RAT) to explore the primary school children's emotional cognition development. The results showed:1) Primary school children's emotional cognition develops with the age increased at school age, especially from grade 2 to grade 4.2) Generally, primary school children's passive self conscious emotion cognition is worse than positive self conscious emotion cognition and basic emotion cognition.3) Basic emotion cognition development is shown by RAT at primary school period. It develops fast from grade 2 to grade 4.4) It is an important period of self conscious emotion cognition development at primary school period. Positive self conscious emotion cognition develops fast from grade 2 to grade 4. Passive self conscious emotion cognition develops slower than the positive one.5) Primary school children's knowledge about the reason of emotion and knowledge about behaviors of emotion develop fast with the age increased at primary school period.6) Pupils' emotion cognition to the emotion expresser is better than that to the emotion recipient apparently. Emotion cognition to the emotion expresser develops fast from grade 2 to grade 4, and it develops earlier than that to the emotion recipient.Although there are some differences in the study's results, the study indicates a lot of development features and tendencies in primary school children' emotional cognition effectively.