The development of belief-based emotion understanding
Date
2014
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Theory of mind (ToM) and emotion knowledge (EK) are important socio-emotional skills that contribute to adaptive social functioning. Yet, research in these domains has lacked a systematic examination of emotion false beliefs, which is the ability to correctly attribute emotions given a false belief. The present study investigated the development of emotion false beliefs in 85 4- and 6-year-olds. It improved upon previous investigations by controlling for memory performance, EK understanding, and verbal ability. It also compared performance across four discrete emotions and used a within-subject design to compare emotion false belief with false belief development. As expected, 6-year-olds performed significantly better on emotion false belief tasks than 4-year-olds, though performance did not vary by discrete emotion. The data supported a developmental precedence of false beliefs before emotion false beliefs, as children were more likely to pass false belief questions than emotion false belief questions. Extending findings from previous literature, false belief performance did not uniquely contribute to emotion false belief performance. False belief and emotion false belief appear to develop along different trajectories, which further supports the idea that attributing emotions to beliefs represents a conceptual change in emotion understanding. These conclusions are discussed in terms of socio-emotional development and clinical applications.