The Development Counterfactual Emotion And Its Influential Factors Of Children From5to12

Counter-factual emotion refers to an emotional experience such as regret, guilty, disappointment, relief, which was caused by the contrast between counter-facts and actual facts, when an individual rejects an actual event result and constructs a hypothetical counterfactual event. It is a particular emotional feeling of human being and has an important effect on an individual’s plan, self-regulation, and decision making. It is also an adaptive emotion. So far most of researches on counterfactual emotion focused on adults and seldom children. Especially in China, relevant experimental studies are limited to repetitive test of the responding ones abroad. Therefore, on the one hand, carrying on developmental researches of domestic children’s counterfactual emotion and studies of its influential factors can fill in the blank area of relevant studies, providing some referential materials for cross-cultural studies. On the other hand, such studies are also initial investigations of occurrence mechanism of counterfactual emotion. In view of this fact, this experimental study includes three parts.Study1explored that effects of "self-others" factors and situational factors on children’s counterfactual emotional development and verified whether developmental delay existed between children’s counterfactual thinking and emotion by introducing open questions of counterfactual thinking.Study2explored functions of emotional contrasting effects on counterfactual emotion. Through presenting and not presenting the model of counterfactual events, we examined whether contrasts between counterfactual options and actual ones could promote the development of children’s counterfactual emotion.Existing researches indicated that individual may have multiple possible options and contrasts between counterfactual options and actual ones were verified as the foundation of counterfactual emotion occurrence. Based on the above results, we proposed hypothesis that children’s counterfactual emotion occurrence was determined by contrasts between multiple extractable counterfactual options and corresponding actual ones. Therefore, study3set an experimental situation to cause children form predictions of counterfactual options and make a contrast with subjects of no predictions to explore whether the two different groups have certain differences.We made below conclusions according to the above3studies.(1) counterfactual emotion of preschool children has begun. Under the condition that initial situation was set as winning, children of5years old could feel relief. No matter whether initial situation was set as winning or losing, children of5years old could feel regrets. We inferred that children’s capacity to experience counterfactual emotion may have developed earlier than previous studying result that it started from at age of6or7years old.(2) situational factors may influence the understanding of younger children’s counterfactual emotion. Compared with positive situations, negative ones can trigger children’s counterfactual emotion more easily. Compared with non-typical situations, typical regret or relief is much easier to evoke counterfactual emotion of children.(3) we also observed that "self-others" separation effects in children’s counterfactual emotion. But this sort of effect only existed in younger preschool children. Compared with older children, cognitive processing and working memory of preschool children has not fully been developed, which correspondingly restricted their understanding about others’cognition and emotions. Furthermore, under the "self condition, the judge ability of preschool children’s counterfactual emotion was significantly higher than that of "other" condition.(4) the results of experiment1showed that open counterfactual questions were more difficult than standard ones whereas no significant difference of difficulty existed between counterfactual emotional questions and the open ones. The above result supported viewpoints of Beck (2005) etc. that the development of children’s counterfactual thinking indeed has a late development:regarding counterfactual event as an event like an actual event with same possibility and this late development is an important condition of counterfactual emotion occurrence.(5) the outstanding contrast result between counterfactual event and actual event doesn’t influence the judgement of children’s counterfactual emotion.(6) counterfactual emotion occurrence is not only from the contrasting results between model of actual events and models of counterfactual events. It also includes other psychological model contrast result that an individual emotion response is determined by actual results, predicting counterfactual results and actual counterfactual results. This supported the psychological model that Byrne etc. proposed.