.3-6 Year-old Children The Development Of Emotional Understanding And Peer Acceptance

The purpose of this study is to find out the developmental trend and characteristic of the 3-6year old children's emotion understanding ,and the relationship between emotion understanding and peer acceptance.There are 120 children aged 3-6 participated in this study,they took four tasks:simple emotion understanding,desire-based emotion understanding,belief-based emotion understanding,mixed emotion understanding.Then all of them accepted peer relation measure.The results indicated:(1) 3-6 aged children's cognition ability of four basic emotion growing with age.The order is happy,angry,sad,fear.There's no significant difference between boys and girls.(2) 3-year-old children already know the relation between emotion and desire,the desire-based emotion understanding developed early in this age grade.(3) 4-year-old children are in the critical period of the ability of belief-based emotion understanding.(4) The ability of desire-based emotion understanding appears earlier than the ability of belief-based emotion understanding. (5) Children aged 5-6 are in the critical period of the ability of mixed emotion understanding. Girls performed better than boys in the task.(6) All tasks except desire-based emotion understanding and mixed emotion understanding significantly positively correlated with each other and total score.It seems that different tasks have inside coherence.(7) Children's performance of simple emotion understanding, belief-based emotion understanding,mixed emotion understanding and total score are significant positively correlated with social preference.(8) Children's performance of simple emotion understanding, belief-based emotion understanding and total score can significantly predict social preference.(9) Children from different peer acceptance group have significant difference in all tasks except desire-based emotion understanding.Popular children performed best in all the tasks while rejected children did worst.