The Influence Of Pride Emotion On Lying Behavior In The 4-to 5-years Old Children

Lying refers to the behavior that an individual deliberately expresses untrue information in order to conceal the truth.Children lie from the age of 2,with the growth of age,the incidence of lying behavior in children is higher and higher.Habitual lying is closely related to children’s problem behaviors and will have a lasting negative impact on the individual’s interpersonal relationship.Therefore,it is a common concern of researchers in many fields such as pedagogy,psychology and sociology to effectively reduce the occurrence of lying and promote honesty.Previous studies have explored the effects of teaching methods commonly used in daily life,such as telling stories,setting examples,and rewards and punishments,on children’s lying behavior.In recent years,studies have shown that improving children’s self-awareness through looking in the mirror,inducing guilt and shame self-awareness emotions can significantly reduce the incidence of lying after children’s violation.Pride is a typical positive selfawareness emotion.Studies have shown that pride helps increase an individual’s selfworth and encourages future behavior that conforms to social values or norms.So,can pride also be effective in reducing lying in young children after violation? This is the main purpose of this study.This study was divided into two experiments.A total of 333 4-5 years old children participated in the temptation resistance task test.(1)In Experiment 1,a complete inter-subject design of 2(age: 4 years old,5 years old)× 3(emotional condition: achievement pride,moral pride,baseline)was used to compare the characteristics of lying behavior of 4 years old and-5 years old children under different emotional conditions.Logical regression analysis showed that among the children with violation of peek,the main effect of age on the incidence of lying behavior was not significant,but the main effect of emotional condition was significant.The post-mortem examination showed that there were significant differences in the incidence of lying behaviors under the three emotional conditions.From low to high,the incidence of lying behaviors was as follows: moral pride(53.73%),achievement pride(73.13%),baseline of no emotion(87.18%).These results suggest that eliciting positive self-awareness emotion--pride,especially moral pride,can effectively reduce the incidence of lying behavior in 4-5 years old children after violation.(2)In Experiment 2,a complete inter-subject design of 2(age: 4 years old,5 years old)× 2(emotional condition: joy emotion,baseline)was used to compare the characteristics of lying behavior of 4 years old and-5 years old children under different emotional conditions.Logistic regression analysis showed that there was no significant effect of age and emotional condition on the incidence of lying among the children who violated the rules of peeking.There was no difference in the incidence of lying behavior between the joy emotion(84.21%)and the baseline condition(87.18%).The results show that inducing the positive general emotion--joy emotion,could not effectively reduce the incidence of children’s lying behavior.In conclusion,eliciting pride emotion can effectively reduce the lying behavior of4-5 years old children,but eliciting joy emotion is not effective.This result suggests that the intervention effect of pride emotion is not caused by its positive emotion valence,but from the self-awareness component.This study shows that pride emotion(especially moral pride)can effectively promote children’s moral behavior,and has important practical guiding significance for educational practice.