Kristin H Lagattuta (1999)
The development of young children's understanding of the causes of emotions: Experimental and natural language studies
Miscellaneous publication.
Humans are a social species; spending the majority of our lives talking with, interacting with, and thinking about other people. This social enterprise is predicated upon two central pieces of knowledge: knowledge about emotions, and an awareness of people's inner mental lives, their minds. This dissertation investigates the development of these social understandings by examining young children's knowledge about the influence of the mind on emotions in both experimental tasks and everyday conversation. Two experimental studies investigated the situations where 3- to 7-year-olds and adults will connect a person's current feelings to the past, especially to thinking about a prior experience. Study 1 presented stories featuring a character who felt sad, mad, or happy after a particular event, and who many days later felt that same emotion upon seeing a cue related to that prior incident. For some story endings, the character's emotion upon seeing the cue was congruent with the current situation, whereas for others, the emotion mismatched the present circumstances. Participants were asked to explain the cause of the character's current feelings. Study 2 extended these methods by examining the influence of person-person fit (whether two people's emotions were the same or different), and access to past history information. Results showed several significant achievements with increasing age. Yet, children as young as 3 produced strikingly cogent explanations about historical and mental influences on current negative emotions. These findings reveal important features of children's early understanding of mind, emotion, and life history, including a prominent focus on negative rather than positive emotions. The significance of negative emotion to children's early understanding of mind, emotion, and life history was corroborated by a third, natural language study. Longitudinal analyses of everyday parent-child conversations between the ages of 2 and 5 revealed that the frequency of talk about past emotional experiences, causal explanations for emotions, and connections between emotions and mental states was significantly higher when children and parents were talking about negative in comparison to positive feelings. Combining experimental with conversational approaches across these studies proves especially informative for illuminating the early development of young children's social knowledge. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)
Database Name: PsycINFO.
Journal Volume: 60.
Journal Issue: 5.
Dissertation Number: AEH9929871.
Publication Type: Dissertation Abstract.
Methodology: Empirical Study.
Population: Human.
Age: Childhood (birth-12 yrs); Preschool Age (2-5 yrs); School Age (6-12 yrs); Adulthood (18 yrs & older).
Identifiers: development of understanding of causes of emotions; 2-7 yr olds & adults.
Classification: 2800 Developmental Psychology.
Update: 20001129.
Accession Number: 1999-95022-182.
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