The Development Of Children's Emotion Understanding And Its Relation To Social Behavior And Peer Status

In recent years, researchers pay more attention to the development of children'stheory of mind, which is a new research area in children's social cognitivedevelopment. Theory of mind, which not only concerns the understanding to one'sperception, attention, belief, etc., but also concerns the understanding to one'semotion and desire, comprises different aspects. During the preschool stage, the maintasks of preschoolers' social development are to make emotion intercourse and tokeep positive peer interaction, but emotion understanding is the focus of thedevelopmental tasks. However, the previous studies pay more attention to children'sunderstanding of false belief, and we have little information about children's emotionunderstanding. The development of emotion understanding can help children torealize the feeling of others and themselves and direct their behavior in peerintercourse. It is obvious that emotion understanding is strongly related to the socialinteraction, social communication and peer relationship in our every day's life. Butsystematic research efforts have been rare in the area. Considering all of above, thegeneral tendencies of the development of children's emotion understanding, and theirrelations to children's peer status and social behavior remain a big area to be explored.Two studies on 105 children aged 3-5 were presented following the objectives setforth in this research. In study 1, Children's ages and gender differences ofunderstanding emotion and their understanding of different emotions were researchedsystematically by interviewing children one by one . Study 2 explored the relationsamong children's emotion understanding, peer status and social behavior.The major findings in the above two studies are as follows:(1) The level of Children's emotion understanding increased with age. Thegender difference wasn't significant(except facial expression recognition).(2) Children's understanding of positive emotion was superior to negativeemotion.(3) Children's social behavior had different tracks: The development ofchildren's prosocial behavior increased with age while aggressive behaviors andsocial withdrawal behaviors increase significantly within 3-4 period but decreasesignificantly within 4-5 period. Girls had more prosocial behaviors and lessaggressive behaviors than boys .(4) Children's emotion understanding significantly correlated with their socialbehavior: the ability of emotion understanding could positive predict the developmentof children's prosocial behavior(except facial expression recognition), emotionattribution could negative predict the development of aggressive behavior.(5) The development of children's social behavior could significant predict theirpeer relation: prosocial behavior could predict children's peer acceptance andaggressive behavior could predict their peer rejection .(6) Children's social behavior acted as a median variable between understandingemotion and peer relation: children's competence of understanding emotioninfluences their peer acceptance though prosocial behavior.