A Study On The Developmental Characteristics Of4-7-year Old Children’s Affective Decision Making

Affective decision making is a capacity of making valid choice from more thantwo different kinds or magnitudes of values when individuals face valuecontradictions causing emotional conflict. As an important social adaptability, itsshortcomings will bring serious personal or social problems (such as crime).Thedomestic research in this field is still in its initial stage. Some researchers introducedfrequently-used research paradigm of affective decision-making from abroad to docross-cultural comparative studies. Some researchers have done some amelioration inthe research paradigm of affective decision-making. And in the research content,researchers had done some research to explore the effect of Single factor to affectivedecision-making. As the basic paradigm of hot executive function, children’sgambling task becomes the most common research method of the affective decisionmaking. But previous studies of child’s affective decision making still have somedisadvantages, such as "the insufficient purification of the children’s gambling task"and "confounding effect between the quantity of the stimulation and the frequency ofthe stimulation".The present study has improved the task of children’s gambling cards, and on thisbasis, we design three experiments to investigate the performances and theirdifferences of the children’s gambling task in three different conditions (the firstcondition is “the stimulations’ quantity of the cards is different”; the second is “thestimulations’ frequency of the cards is different” and the third is “reward andpunishment had been reversed”).Three experiments are used by within-subjectsdesign, and they were completed in different times by824-7-year old children. Ineach experiment, everyone should make50choices, and every10choices form onegroup, there are5groups in each experiment. Synthesizing the results of three experiments, we get the following conclusions:Firstly, in the situation of “enlarge the discrepancy between the transient stimulusand delayed stimulus”, children’s performance was at a low level in the children’sgambling task. And there were no gender differences or no age differences or classdifferences.Secondly, in the situation of “enlarge the frequency of the delayed indefinitestimulus (punishment)”, children’s performance was at a high level in the children’sgambling task, and there were only group differences in children’s performance,without age differences or class differences.Thirdly, in the situation of “reversal between reward and punishment”, children’sperformance was also at a low level in the children’s gambling task. But the group’smain effect is significant, the interaction effect between group and age is significant,and the interaction effect between group and class is also significant.Fourthly, children’s performance in the situation of “enlarge the discrepancybetween the transient stimulus and delayed stimulus” was higher then it in thesituation of “enlarges the frequency of the delayed indefinite stimulus (punishment)”.