Children's Understanding Of Anger, Sadness And Different Beliefs

Desire-belief psychology is a central part of children's theory-of-mind. Previous studies ondesire-belief-emotion are similar to the paradigms of ToM, just replacing the action-predictionwith the general positive and negative emotions(happy or unhappy)-prediction. They have notconsidered about the nature of specific emotions. Rieffe argued that the nature of emotionsinteracted with the desire and belief(Rieffe,2005).Anger and sadness are two basic negative emotions in children's everyday life. There areboth differences and similarities between these two emotions. Hughes (2002) proposed thatchildren referred to much more mental states when talking about sadness than when talkingabout anger. Another study found that, anger and sadness may have differences in evaluating asituation (protagonist's belief about whether the goals can be reinstated or not.) (Levine, 1995)The present study expected to explore children's understanding of anger and sadness basedon different beliefs, that is, when do children begin to predict others' anger or sadness byothers' different beliefs. The present study included three experiments: studyl, 4-7-year-oldchildren were examined whether they can predict others' anger or sadness by others' differentbeliefs(belief A: someone believe the protagonist focuses the consequences of event and theresults can not be reinstated; belief B: someone believe the protagonist focuses the causes ofevent and the results can be reinstated); study2, 4-6-year-old children were examined whetherthey can predict others' anger or sadness when standing out the differences of beliefs; Study3,4~6-year-old children were further examined whether they can predict others' anger or sadnesswhen standing out the differences of beliefs.Results: study 1 showed that 7-year-old children began to predict others' anger andsadness by reasoning about others' beliefs; study 2 showed that 6-year-old children can predictothers' anger and sadness by reasoning about others' different beliefs when standing out thedifferent beliefs. However, study 2 found that even 6-year-old children cannot explainingsadness and anger referring to mental states. 4-year-old children neither can predict others'anger and sadness by reasoning about others' different beliefs when standing out the differentbeliefs nor when displaying the others' belief. But 4-year-old children have aware thatprotagonists who have different beliefs about the same event can have different emotions.Study 3 confirmed the results of study 2 and showed that 5～6-year-old children' s ability ofpredicating sadness and anger when standing out the differences of beliefs increase year byyear.