Study On The Emotional Masking Of 5-9 Year-Old Children

Emotion is a human experience, the attitude of objective things and the corresponding behavior, but also an important component of the individual psychological experience. A widely held assumption is that the emotions have, in their expression, a communicative function. They constitute a language that effectively signals to other one's emotional state (Ekman,1997). For the younger infants and young children, their emotional expression is often explicit and direct, it is able to observe these young children's facial expressions, voice or body movements, you can roughly judge from their emotional state at the time. When children grow up, they have more and more opportunities for direct interaction with other people in society. In order to safeguard the interests of themselves or others, children began to strategically adjust their own emotional expression, thereby leading to the inner emotional experience and emotional expression inconsistent, which is known as emotional masking. Emotional masking can be made in line with social rules for children to demonstrate the appropriateness of emotional behavior, helping them to better adapt to society. Many foreign researchers have a high level of interest in which children how and when from the explicit, direct emotional expression, and gradually learn to adapt to social norms and individual needs disguised expression of their emotions, and thus launched a series of children's emotional masking-related research, but for different age stages of the development of Children's Emotional Masking hold a different view.Mixed experimental design of this study selected 246 5-9 years old children at random as subjects from a kindergarten and two primary schools in the city of Jinhua, using six context story with the pictures in experiments. The study includes two experiments. The first experiment was to explore the emotional masking trends and characteristics of 5-9 years old child's in the context of Chinese culture, analysis of emotional masking development differences of children in different emotions and different emotional masking motive. The second experiment was to explore whether the child will be disguise emotions in the same situations trigger their emotions according to different types of roles in order to understand the difference of the emotional masking which children with different types of characters, thus analyze the possible causes and find the underlying factors of the development of children's-emotional masking. Not only provide children emotional education with the more theoretical basis in the context of Chinese culture, but also provides the study of children socialization with more valuable information to help parents, teachers and other adults to correctly understand and guide the child's social emotional behavior.Through the analysis of the results of the experimental data, this study reached the following conclusions:Conclusion 1. There were significant age differences in the development of Children's Emotional masking. Children in five years already possess the preliminary ability of emotional masking, which increased gradually with their age. However there were no significant gender differences in the development of Children's Emotional Masking.Conclusion2. There were significant differences between the Children's negative emotional masking and positive emotional masking. The ability of children's negative emotion masking was better than positive emotion masking.Conclusion3. There were significant differences between the Children's emotional masking in self-protection motive and emotional masking in prosocial motive. The ability of children's emotion masking in self-protection motive was better than in prosocial motive.Conclusion4.There were significant differences in children's emotional masking ability of different types of interpersonal. The ability of children's emotion masking in which interpersonal type is other adults was better than in which interpersonal type is peer or family. The ability of children's emotion masking in which interpersonal type is family is minimum.