Study On The Development Of Emotion Comprehension Of 2-9 Year-Old Children

Emotion understanding is one of the most important parts of children's theory of mind. In the recent 20 years, more and more researchers are interested in this area. Most of the researches focused on either the young children's specific aspect of emotional understanding or various aspects at a certain age, for example, as Jones (1998), Saarni (1997). Pons & Harris et al. (2002) summarized, a substantial body of research showed that at least nine components of emotion understanding are developed during childhood: recognition of emotion on the basis of expressive cues; understanding of the role of external causes, desires, beliefs, and reminders; understanding of the control of either expressed or experienced emotions; understanding of the emotional regulation, understanding of the mixed nature of emotions and of the moral or social emotions. They also compiled the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) to assess the understanding of nine aspects of emotions of 3-11 year-old children. They found that hierarchical relations exist among components from successive phases; and identified three developmental phases, named external, mental and reflective.In order to examine the development of Chinese children's understanding of emotion and the differences among the 9 components' developmental relations, and to compare it with the results of Western countries, Study 1 was conducted. Study 1 developed the picture presentation of TEC into a computer program, and interviewed 314 Chinese children aged 2-9. Results were found that, being similar to the Western children, the 9 components, 3 phrases and the total level of the emotional understanding developed with age; and hierarchical relations were existed among components; Differences of arrangement and factor sorting between Chinese and western children was suggested as below: reminder is carried backward, being shifted from external to mental; mixed emotion is carried forward, being shifted from reflective to mental; the distinction between real and apparent emotions was firmly related to the components.Considering that there is only single item on each of the six components, and single pictures can not make young children understand the story well, Study 2 was designed in order to improve the reliability and validity, and to investigate the emotional understanding of the young children. The goal of study 2 is to examine whether the distinction between real and apparent emotions vary according with the valence of the real emotion, and to compare with the results got in TEC directly. In this study, we carefully selected 6 stories, three of which are positive in real emotion and the rest three are negative, redesigned them into Flash cartoons which are easier to understand. In this way we assessed 108 children aged 3-6. The results suggested that: 3-4 year-old children begin to understand the distinction between real and apparent emotions, the children after 5 can totally understand; compared with negative real emotions, children do better in distinction the real and apparent emotion of positive ones; compared with the results of TEC, younger children can distinguish the real and apparent emotion.The following conclusions were made in this paper:1. Being similar to the Western children, the 9 components, 3 phrases and the total level of the emotional understanding developed with age; and hierarchical relations were existed among components;2. Generally, the development of emotion understanding in Chinese children is slightly earlier than that in western ones, and the development order of a few component is different, too;3. By using simpler materials and task settings, younger children can distinguish the real and apparent emotion.