The Development Of Children’s Counterfactual Emotion Understanding And Its Influence On Children’s Helping Behavior

Counterfactual emotion is based on the counterfactual thinking, it’s a complex secondary emotions, it refers to people who denies facts about what has happened and creates a virtual counterfactual results, and the counterfactual results and the fact that when comparing the results of emotional experience. Regret and joyful are two kinds of typical counterfactual emotions, which represent the negative emotion and positive emotion. As a kind of based on counterfactual thinking on secondary mood experience,regret is defined for the event has happened in the past were negative and the construction of a possible hypothesis thinking activity, it as a counterfactual thinking of the secondary emotion based on experience, judgment and decision making is an event in the past have happened a mental simulation. Regret is a complex cognitive emtion, its internal is counterfactual thinking, it is a kind of emotional experience that is produced by the individual to imagine or realize that if other decisions or actions are taken before, the result will be better than it is now. Joyful is the emotion which for is will have occurred in outcome and a possible, than the current results worse in comparison with the results generated after the pleasure mood, can stimulate people’s behavioral tendencies. The development of children’s counterfactual emotion depends on the understanding of the counterfactual emotion. The counterfactual emotion understanding means the external and internal mental state of the emotion,it’s based on the counterfactual thinking.Fristly, this research discussed the relationship between counterfactual emotion understanding of children and the relationship between counterfactual thinking and counterfactual emotions with helping behavior,it shows gender differences, children’s counterfactual emotion understanding age has not yet obtained similar results, and the relationship between counterfactual thinking and counterfactual emotion is not have a clear conclusion. counterfactual emotion as a kind of secondary emotion, whether it can affect the children’s behavior? So this study use the children of different grades as the research object,to explore the children’s counterfactual emotion understanding development, the relationship between counterfactual thinking and counterfactual emotion and counterfactual emotion of children’s helping behavior.Study 1,used the small, middle and large class of 120 children as subjects,exploring children regret and joyful counterfactual emotion understanding, and development of grade, gender, self other situation on children’s regret, joyful that the two counterfactual emotion understanding’s interaction. The results showed that:(1) for children’s counterfactual emotion understanding increased with age, small class’ s children can understand counterfactual emotion;(2) self other situations can affect children’s counterfactual emotion understanding, in the context of self, each grade children can understand the regret and glad mood, in the context of others next, small class’ s children can’t understand others counterfactual emotion, class and class children can understand other people’s counterfactual emotion;(3) there was no significant difference between children’s counterfactual emotion understanding of gender;(4) children to regret and counterfactual emotion understanding has no significant difference, small class’ s children can understand both regret and joyful.Study 2,used 73 children of the large class in a kindergarten as subjects, through two experimental situations to discuss the relationship between the counterfactual emotion and counterfactual thinking. The research results show that:(1) there’s a relationship between counter factual emotion and counter factual thingking. Different counterfactual thinking can affect the counterfactual emotion. Upward counterfactual thinking will influence of feeling regret and downward counterfactual thinking will have an impact on the joyful feelings; at the same time, the feeling of regret are more likely to lead to upward counterfactual thinking, the joyful feelings are more likely to lead to downward counterfactual thinking;(2) gender in upward counterfactual thinking lead to regret the emotional differences, but in downward counterfactual thinking triggered the grateful feelings but there is no difference; the influence of gender on counterfactual thinking is not obvious, the different gender children against fact inference direction does not exist significant differences.Study 3,used 63 children of the large class in a kindergarten as subjects, investigating in positive and negative situations, regret, joyful’s influence on children’s helping behavior. The results showed that:(1) positive- negative situation can influence on children helping behavior, children in positive situation would appear more helping behaviors;(2) counterfactual emotion of regret and joyful can affect children’s helping behavior, in the mood of joyful, the child will appear more helping behaviors;(3) the children helping behavior does not exist significant gender differences.