Developmental Characteristics Of Children's Emotional Decision Making: In The Children's Gambling Task

The interaction of emotional process and cognitive process is a hotspot in present researches of psychology, and it focus on the problem of emotional decision making. Emotional decision making is a capacity of making valid choice from more than two different kinds or magnitude of values. As an important capacity of adapting to our society, it aims to make choice availed for oneself or other persons in our society. The Gambling Task which resembles the decisions made in real life in terms of reward, punishment and the uncertainty of outcomes is most broadly used tool for researches on emotional decision making.The researches on preschool children's emotional decision making are few but very meaningful. However, in the past, some of gambling tasks are not simple enough and beyond the cognitive of children. Therefore they were unable to analyze the developmental characteristics of children and the factors infect on children's performance in the tasks. Other tasks involved only one or two infect factors and even haven't controlled different factors and isolated them. That's why we design three experiments to inspect the infect factors in Gambling Task.In experiment 1 we hope to know whether reverse the standard task will infect children's decision making. 60 young children between ages 3 and 5 are conducted on a version of standard Gambling Task which will have a gain every time but get lost sometimes, and a version of reverse Gambling Task which will get lost every time but have a gain sometimes. In conclusion, there are no different between standard task AB and reverse task A'B'. However, after reversing the task, children between ages 3 and 4 have no changes but it impair the performance of 5-year-old children. So we consider that conquering the lure of reward to make choice availed is much simpler than overcoming the impulsion to avoid punishment. In conclusion, in task AB there are significant difference between years of 3, 4 and 5 which shows that there is a very fast developmental increase in emotional decision making of children between ages 3 and 4, and after that till 5-year-old the capacity is keeping developing.Experiment 2 mainly aims to exam whether the frequency of rewards and punishment will infect children's behavior. Another 60 young children between ages 3 and 5 are conducted on a standard task (AC) and a reverse task (A'C'). Keeping the total mount of gain and loss, we enhanced the frequency of delayed reward/punishment. We found that children are very sensitive to the frequency. Enhancing the frequency of delayed punishment will improve the performance of 3-years-old children but enhancing the frequency of delayed rewards won't. For 4 and 5, they will both improve their performance.Experiment 3 mainly aims to exam the infection from quantity of rewards and punishment. Another 60 young children between ages 3 and 5 are conducted on a standard task (AD) and a reverse task (A'D'). Comparing with Experiment 2 (AC & A'C'), the differences are the immediate rewards/punishment is expanded to 1:3 from 1:2. We found that expanding the immediate quantity won't change the performance of children in the tasks. In addition, there is a very fast developmental increase in emotional decision making of children between ages 3 and 4. Children in 4 will change their choice affected by the quantity of delayed punishment and the performance of children in 5 are much more stable.Summing up the result of three experiments, we can get conclusions as follows:1. There is a very fast developmental increase in emotional decision making of children between ages 3 and 4, and after that till 5-year-old the capacity is keeping developing.2. Children between ages 4 and 5 are very sensitive to delayed punishment and reward frequency, while 3-year-old children also has the sensitivity to the delayed punishment frequency.3. Children aren't very sensitive to the quantity of rewards and punishment. After expanding the differences of immediate stimulate quantity, children in 3 still are in a poor level and have no significant changes on performance. Children in 4 change their performance affected by the quantity of delayed punishment. The performances of children in 5 are much more stable.