Children's Understanding of Belief-based Emotion

Résumé du livre

This thesis investigates the age at which children acquire a common-sense ability to predict emotions in terms of their prerequisite mental states. More specifially, it studies the age at which children are able to understand that being pleased and surprised are dependent on desires and beliefs respectively.Chapters 1 and 2 are literature chapters. Chapter 1 provides the conceptual analysis used throughout the thesis. Support for this analysis is sought in both the philosophical and psychological literature. Chapter 2 reviews past and current research on children's understanding of feeling pleased and surprised, in particular, studies investigating children's understanding of the dependence of emotion on belief and desire.Chapter 3 presents Experiment 1. This experiment looks at children's ability to predict that someone will feel pleased or surprised on the basis of another's respective desires and beliefs. The results show that three- and four-year-olds are able to predict whether someone will be pleased on the basis of his desires but not whether he will be surprised on the basis of his beliefs.Chapter 4 reports two experiments that concentrate on the emotion surprise with the aim of showing some understanding of this emotion in four-year-olds. However, despite the use of different methodologies four-year-olds still proved unable to understand the belief-dependency of this emotion even though they had little difficulty inferring the belief of the protagonist from story events. Moreover, Experiment 2 revealed that even five-year-olds had difficulty in predicting surprise on the basis of belief. There was a clear developmental lag between understanding belief and making belief-based emotion judgements.In Chapter 5 the results of Experiment 4 show that the difficultly children encounter in predicting emotion on the basis of belief is not specific to surprise. Children of four years were equally unable to predict happiness when this was made dependent on belief. A comparable development of understanding surprise and belief-based happiness was found. Children who failed to predict happiness on the basis of belief based their emotion prediction on the reality of the situation.Chapter 6 presents three experiments with the aim of discovering the basis of younger children's surprise predictions. Experiment 5 revealed that many four-, five- and six-year-olds seemed to equate surprise with the experience of a desirable story outcome. Experiments 6 and 7 revealed a tendency to judge surprise by the unusualness of story outcome regardless of the protagonist's expectation of such an outcome.Finally, Experiment 8 presented in Chapter 7, reports* a finding that children's understanding of belief-based happiness can be improved when children are given one or two action prediction tasks based on false belief prior to an emotion task. This gave some hope that children of four years of age may have some nascent ability to predict emotion on the basis of belief.The final chapter discusses the results in light of present developmental research. Support for the findings that children are aware of a protagonist's mental state but do not predict emotion on the basis of this were found. Explanations as to why children did not take subjective factors into account in their prediction of emotion are discussed in relation to the way in which children learn about their emotional worlds. Possible findings that the potential nascent understanding of belief-based happiness does not extend to surprise are considered. Suggestions for future research are also made.