3-6 Years Old Children Emotion Understanding And Peer Acceptance

The purpose of this study was to examine young children’s emotional understanding developmental characteristics and the relation between emotional understanding and peer preference through a two-year longitudinal study.The data was collected in december2010(Time1) and May2012(Time2). The procedure was the same at the2times.39young children were investigated by testing and story-telling interview in study1, in which we try to find out young children’s emotional understanding developmental characteristics,and were investigated by peer nomination to explore the young children’s peer preference. The results are as follows: Young children’s emotional understanding developmental characteristic:(1) In general,the ability of young children’s emotion understanding grow with age. There was no significant difference between boys and girls.(2) Children aged3could recognize the facial expression of happy、angry、fear and sad basically;Children’s understanding of positive emotion was superior to negative emotion;Boy’s ability of recoginzing the facial expression of angry was superior than girl’s.(3) Children of3years old have owned emotion perspective-taking ability of happny;Girls have owned emotion perspective-taking ability of sad,while boys’ have been growing with age during early childhood;Emotion perspective-taking ability of sad remains to be development.(4) Chidren’ ability of explaining the reason of happy、fear、angry and sad growed with age.(5) Young children’s ability of understanding conflicting emotions was superior to the ability of understanding mixed emotions.(6) The ability of desire-based emotion understanding appears earlier than the ability of belief-based emotion understand;both of them were high when6-year-old.Relation between emotional understanding and peer preference:(1) Peer preference was stable within two years;Repeated measure revealed that there was a significant difference in gender.(2) Children’s peer preference are positively correlated with emotion perspective-taking ability、ability of explaining the reason of emotion during the same period significant.which had moderate correlations.(3) Peer preference can predict emotion perspective-taking ability to the younger childern;while both can predict each other as children growing.(4) Chidren’ability of explaining the reason of emotion and peer preference can predict each other.