A Study On The Development Relationship Between Judgement Of Moral Emotion And Theory Of Mind In Children

Judgement of moral emotion refers to children's emotional judgement of situations and events which are related to morality. Theory of mind refers to individuals' understanding of their mental state such as beliefs, intentions and wishes toward themselves or others, and they explain and predict others' mind and behavior by recurring to this understanding. Emotion understanding refers to the ability to explain emotion clues and emotion information.Judgement of moral emotion and theory of mind are two hot issues of children's mental development in recent years. Discussions of the relationship between them have great significance in our better understanding of children's moral development and theory of mind. In fact, the relationship between them relates to some basic issues in cognition developmental mechanism, while children psychologists have different ideas about this. We think that there is a common component in judgement of moral emotion and theory of mind, but they are not superposition; there is a certain correlation between judgement of moral emotion and theory of mind; emotionunderstanding of theory of mind has great influence on judgement of moral emotion; there are different developmental patterns of judgement of moral emotion and emotion understanding of theory of mind.However, so far few researchers have tried to discuss correlation mechanism of judgement of moral emotion and theory of mind. In addition, existed studies, both domestic and overseas, of emotion understanding development of children's theory of mind have many contradictory results. Therefore, it is necessary to design an experiment including judgement of moral emotion and theory of mind to discuss the relationship between them and examine their main developmental patterns in children.Therefore, this study, based on the theoretical assumption that there exist common components but not superposition between judgement of moral emotion and theory of mind, makes amendment on Bradmetz and Scheneider's tasks (2004) of theory of mind, makes the tasks include moral factors, and makes them measure children's emotion understanding of theory of mind, development of judgement of moral emotion, and the relationship between them. Then the subjects were distributed into three classes by developmental levels of belief-based emotion understanding understanding, and were tested by a moral emotion understanding test with four stories in social-moral situations which adapted from Sy and DeMeis's tasks (2003) of judgement of moral emotion. It tries to study the relationship between theory of mind and judgement of moral emotion and their developmental patterns among children aged from 4 to 7 years old.In experiment 1, we adopted 259 4-7 years old children as the subjects, used a 2 (Task) X 4 (Age) two-factor mixed design in which Task is a within-subjects factor and Age is a between-subjects factor. It tried to investigate developmental levels of TOM and MEJ and relationship between them. Then subjects were distributed into three classes: Low Level, Middle Level and High Level in terms of the developmental levels of belief-based emotion understanding. In experiment 2, we adopted the same subjects and a 3 (ToM Level) X 4(Moral Situation) two-factor mixed design in which ToM Level is a between-subjects factor, Moral Situation is a within-subjects factor. Itinvestigated children's ratings on actors' emotions, in order to investigate the correlation between emotion understanding of ToM and MEJ.This study got the following conclusions:(1) There is a certain significant correlation between judgement of moral emotion and theory of mind; and 4-7 years old children's emotion judgement on actor in moral situations is influenced by their development of emotion understanding of theory of mind.(2) There are different developmental patterns of judgement of moral emotion and emotion understanding of theory of mind in 4-7 years old children.(3) Development of cognition components of children's theory of mind increases with age increasing. 4-year-old children can completely understand wishes and have the basic ability to understand beliefs.(4) The development of perception components of children's theory of mind increases with age increasing. 4-year-old children can completely understand wish-based emotions; belief-based emotion understanding appears later than wish-based emotion understanding. 4-year-old children are in the leaping period of emotion understanding development of theory of mind; and 5-year-old children begin to understand belief-based emotion at large. There is a lap between development of belief understanding and belief-based emotion understanding.(5) In ToM task including happy emotion, there is a significant difference in gender in the aspect of children's understanding of beliefs, and passing rates of males are significantly higher than those of females; development of perspective-taking has a significant gender difference, and passing rates of males are significantly better than those of females.(6) Children's theory of mind and judgement of moral emotion have the characteristics of task-speciality, and both of them are affected by those emotion types contained in tasks.(7) 4-7 years old children's strategy of moral emotional judgement on actor is perspective-taking, not projecting.