Research On The Development Of Cognitive Abilities Of Emotional Display Rules In Preschoolers

The development of cognitive abilities of emotional display rules (EDRs), which has an important significance in children's emotional healthy development, is an important developmental task of children's socialization. And it's imbalance may lead to children's emotional problems. Now it has been an important field of research of developmental psychology.This research synthesized and summed up many researches about the concept of emotional display rules, and pointed out some problems in current researches. Emotional display rules is a set of rules which is obtained in the course of children's socialization, and can guide the apparent expression to satisfy the social expectations. Emotional display rules provides rules about how to express the emotion appropriately in which situations and to whom. Cognitive abilities of EDRs include two factors: expression regulation knowledge and display rule goal. Expression regulation knowledge tell us how to appropriately express the emotion in particular social context. Emotion regulation goals refer to children's use of EDRs in regulating the external emotional expression and their own motives , and can be divided into self protect goal and social orientation goal. Driven by the EDRs, Individuals use available strategies which mainly include four types of strategies: neutralization, masking, maximization and minimization, to suppress, control, regulating the external expression.Based on questions in the current researches, this research recruited 138 4~6 years old preschoolers as participants. And the research used the method of story interview and executed three experiments to study the development of cognitive abilities of EDRs in preschoolers. In experiment 1, we examined the cognitive development of children's negative EDRs in different age, gender and target by interviewing children one by one. In experiment 2, we examined the cognitive development of children's positive EDRs in different age, gender and target by interviewing children one by one. Based on the results of experiment 1 and 2, experiment 3 examined the differences between negative EDRs and the positive ones, as well as children's four emotional display strategies.Based on the above three experiments, the major findings are as follows:(1) Generally, the cognitive abilities of preschoolers's EDRs increased with age. And it enters a fast development stage at five and six years old . Their level of negative EDRs enters a fast development stage at five ; After one year, the level has already achieved certain mature level. Howeve, children's level of positive EDRs enters a fast development stage in six ge.(2) Children's developmental level of cognitive abilities of EDRs has differences with vary emotion regulation goals. Children's cognitive capacity with self protect goal is higher than social orientation goal.(3) The emotion types of preschoolers's EDRs exists significant main effects. The level of children's EDRs in negative emotion situation is significantly higher than in positive emotion situation.(4) Preschoolers used neutralization most, followed by masking, minimization using less, and rarely used maximization.(5) Preschoolers used different EDRs strategies in two emotion context. Children use more masking strategies in negative emotion situation than positive emotion situation. Children use more neutralization strategies in positive emotion situation than negative emotion situation.