5-to 9-year-old Children's Understanding Of Emotion In The Desire-rule Conflict Situation

2-to 3-year-old children can understand the connection between desires and emotions, and 4-year-old children begin to understand the emotions which are connected by beliefs. In children's everyday life, emotions are not only affected by psychological factors, such as desires and beliefs, but also external factors, such as rules. Children's gradual understanding that rules can affect emotion is part of their social cognition developmentResearchers have found the phenomenon of "happy victimizers". Young children attribute positive emotions to the victimizer, and older children attribute less. Besides, research results in the conventional domain are similar, young children attribute positive emotions to the transgressors and negative emotions to the abiders, and older children attribute more negative emotions to the transgressors and positive emotions to the abiders.The goal of current research is to investigate the children's emotion understanding in the desire-rule conflict situation in the conventional domain, to find the developmental change in the emotion predictions and explanations, and to compare the predictions of other people with the predictions of children themselves. 48 5-to 9-year-old children were interviewed with 8 desire-rule conflict stories. The children were asked to predict emotions and explain them during the first four stories, and were asked to explain the emotions which are mismatched with desires during the last four stories. The results are as following:There are developmental changes in the others' desire-emotion mismatch predictions. Older children predicted more desire-emotion mismatch, and explained more how future consequences influence emotions.Children provided less goal-oriented explanations in the explanation stories than the prediction stories, and provided more future-oriented explanations.Children predicted more primary desire-emotion mismatch to themselves than to the story protagonists, and they provided less goal-oriented and more future-oriented explanations.Children consistently evaluated that the protagonist who obeyed the rule did the right thing, and violated the rule did the wrong thing.