Related Research About The 3 To 4 Children Emotional Development And The Mother Emotional Expressiveness, Its Educational Implications

Based on the Theory of mind (TOM), the present study investigated developmental characteristics of 3-4 children's emotion understanding. This research also attempts to examine the relationship between the family emotion expressiveness (mainly focusing on mothers) and children's emotion understanding. This study will contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms and individual differences in the development of children's emotional understanding; furthermore it can provide us the theoretical and practical guide on fostering children's emotion understanding skills.In first part of this study, the important previous researches on the development of children's emotion understanding development and the relationship between family emotion expression and children's emotion understanding were discussed. It was found that current researches on children's emotional development in China mainly stay in the outer relationship which failed to examine deeply the mechanism of that relationship. Based on this view, the following experiments were examined.In the second part of this study, two experiments were done. In study one, the major findings are as follows:(l) 3-4 children's emotion understanding developed quickly as they get older, desire emotion understanding developed earlier than belief emotion understanding; (2) young children's emotion understanding was related to language, in particularly belief-desire emotion understanding. In study two, the results indicated that: (1) mother's emotional expressiveness was significantly correlated to the young children's emotion understanding ; (2) Mothers' expressiveness of positive emotion was related to children's better understanding of emotion, however, the relationship between the negative expressiveness and young children's emotion understanding was not consistent , expressiveness of negative-submissive emotion is related to young children's better understanding of emotions, conversely, mother's negative-dominant expressiveness was not related to young children's emotion understanding.In the section of discussion, the relationship between children's emotion understanding and mothers' emotion expressiveness was discussed based on the results.In the end, suggestions for preschool education and the future direction of thisfield were concluded.