The Development Of Primary School Children’s Ability Of Embarrassment Understanding And The Influence Of Embarrassment On Their Cooperative Behavior

The focus of emotion research shift to the self-conscious emotion gradually，soembarrassment was focused on by emotional psychologists and developmentalpsychologists. As a kind of self-conscious emotions，embarrassment closely related to theprimacy school children’s social development, especially the development of pro-socialbehavior. In this research primary school children’s developmental characteristics onembarrassment understanding and the influence of embarrassment on cooperative behaviorare investigated.A comprehensive embarrassment literature review was made on the empirical findingsin the present existing study. On the basis of analysis on previous studies, three studieswere present.In study1，we collected and verified the embarrassment context stories from twogroups which are randomly selected from1-6grades (194in group1，193in group2)as themeasure material for developmental characteristics of the ability of embarrassmentunderstanding in study2. The material includes three scenarios stories and each scenarioconsists of two story，each story was set after same three questions to find out theunderstanding of primary school children on feeling of embarrassment， reason ofembarrassment and the behavior after embarrassment.In study2， we used the measure material made in study1to measure thedevelopmental characteristics of239primary school children’s ability of embarrassmentunderstanding from1-6grades.The results were as follows:(1) Primary school children’s ability of embarrassment understanding has an overalldevelop trend，and in grade5-6there was a stage of rapid development. There was nogeneral gender difference on ability of embarrassment understanding；(2) The ability ofembarrassment understanding in different scenarios stories generally conform to the whole line development trend of embarrassment understanding. And，there was no significantgender differences in three scenarios；(3) There were no significant differences on abilityof embarrassment understanding among three scenarios，and score in the three scenarios indescending order was sticky situation、faux passituation、being the center of attentionsituation.；(4) There were significant grade differences on subsequent behaviors ofprimary school children in different embarrassment scenarios，but no significant genderdifferences. The subsequent behavior of primary school children is most commonly used intwo ways: explanation and compensation.In study3，we used adjusted prisoner’s dilemma game as the dependent variablemeasuring，and different ability of embarrassment understanding，different emotion stateand different type of embarrassment understanding as the independent variables，to studythe influence of embarrassment on cooperation of76children from Grade4-6. The resultswere as follows:(1) There was a significant main effect of ability of embarrassment understanding tocooperative behavior of primary school children，that children of high embarrassmentunderstanding showed more cooperative behaviors；(2)The main effect of emotional stateon primary school children’s cooperative behavior was significant,that children who feelembarrassment showed more cooperative behaviors comparede with children who didn’tfeel embarrassment；(3)There was a marginally significant two-way interactions betweenability of embarrassment understanding and emotional state，that among the children whoexperience embarrassment，all children were inclined to cooperate;among the childrenwho didn’t experience embarrassment， children of high embarrassment understandingshowed more cooperative behaviors.