A Study On The Children’s Understanding Of Regret Emotion And The Relationship With Counterfactual Understanding

Emotion understanding,as a social perception element of theory of mind, has beenpaid more and more attention by researchers.The counterfactual thinking,as a special wayof thinking,focusing on events in actual fact that not happened,has been researchedabroadly.So there is a new research problem,that the emotion based on counterfactualthinking,called counterfactual emotion.The counterfactual emotion contains negativeemotions(regret,disappointment,etc)and positive emotions(relief,congratulation,etc).Thestudies about positive counterfactual emotion are less,but about negative aremore.However, these studies mainly towards to adults and childrens of old years.This study only choose one of the counterfactual emotions-----regret to study.120children aged5to8year’s old have been employed in this study.And there are15boys and15girls in every age.The children were presented with two tasks of self and others.The aimof this study is to investigate the characteristic and developmental trend of children’sunderstanding of regret emotion,and the relationship with counterfactual thinking.Theresults are as follows:(1) Children begin to understand regret at6year’s old. The key age of understanding regretof children is7.(2) The ability of counterfactual thinking in all the children develop well.The difference ofthe development of counterfactual thinking beween this study and present studies canattributed to the difficulty of the task.(3) There’s no significant difference between self regre task and other regre task.(4) Children who pass the regret task all can pass counterfactual thinking task almost,butchildren who pass counterfactual thinking task only46.4%can pass regret task. Wesuggest that thinking about counterfactuals as possibilities is a necessary but notsufficient cognitive development in children’s understanding of reget.