The Development Of Primary School Children's Ability Of Shame Understanding And The Influence Of Shame On Their Cooperative Behavior

Recent years,shame was focused on by emotional psychologists and developmental psychologists as a self-conscious emotion. As a senior emotion,shame closely related to the moral development and it's characteristics of occurrence and development were great significant to the individual's development. In this research primary school children's developmental characteristics on shame understanding and the influence of shame on cooperative behavior are investigated.A comprehensive literature review was made on the important empirical findings in the present study. On the basis of analysis on previous studies, three studies were present.In study 1,we collected and verified the shame context stories from two groups which are randomly selected from 1-6 grades (120 in group 1,180 in group 2,evenly divided between boys and girls)as the measure material for developmental characteristics of the ability of shame understanding in study 2. The material includes four scenarios stories and each story was set after same three questions to find out the understanding of primary school children on feeling of shame,reason of shame and the behavior after shame..In study 2, we used the measure material made in study 1 to measure the developmental characteristics of 300 primary school children's ability of shame understanding from 1-6 grades (50 per grade, evenly divided between boys and girls) .The results were as follows:(1) Primary school children's ability of shame understanding has an overall develop trend,and in grade 2-3 there was a stage of rapid development. There was no general gender difference on ability of shame understanding; (2) The ability of shame understanding in different scenarios stories generally conform to the whole line development trend of shame understanding . However, there were differences between ?different grades;there was no significant gender differences in four scenarios except morality;(3) There were significant differences on ability of shame understanding among four scenarios,and children has the highest ability of shame understanding in morality scenarios; (4) There were significant grade differences on subsequent behaviors of primary school children in different shame scenarios , but no significant gender differences; (5) Primary school children tend to choose positive behaviors such as make up or make up for the future behavior as the subsequent acts of shame in different shame scenarios .In study 3,we used adjusted prisoner's dilemma game as the dependent variable measuring ,and different ability of shame understanding,different emotion state and different type of the role of emotion as the independent variables,to study the influence of shame on cooperation of 80 children from Grade 6. The results were as follows:(1) There was a significant main effect of ability of shame understanding to cooperative behavior of primary school children , that higher ability of shame understanding's children showed more cooperative behaviors;(2)The main effect of emotional state on primary school children's cooperative behavior did not reach significant level;(3)There was a significant two-way interactions between the type of the role of emotion and emotional state,that endogenous shame promoted lower ability of shame understanding children's cooperative behaviors;(4)There was no signigicant three-way interaction among the three variables.