Child Development Theories and Examples

Children's Conceptions Of Emotions

The research that seems to have advanced farthest involves the development of conceptions of emotions in school-age children. During the school years, several major changes take place, as children become able to understand that a person can experience two distinct emotions at the same time and then to integrate emotions into abstract categories for interpreting behavior.
To study how children think about their emotions, Hatter (1982) devised a series of interview tasks ingeniously adapted to avoid the usual problems that arise with interviewing young children. Her research demonstrated systematic changes in the organization of children's thinking about emotions in themselves and in other people. One of the central changes was that children gradually became able to conceive of themselves as experiencing two distinct emotions at the same time, as when a girl felt happy that her parents gave her a bicycle but sad that it was only a 3-speed not a 10-speed. Preschoolers were unable to think of experiencing two emotions simultaneously. The best they could do was to portray one emotion followed by another: The girl with the bicycle could first feel happy that she had been given a bicycle and later feel sad that it was not a 10-speed. The elementary school years marked the onset of the capacity to conceive of experiencing two emotions simultaneously, and not until age 9 or later was this ability fully consolidated across Harter's various interview tasks.
Hand (1982) found the same general developmental pattern with a different type of emotion category and a different methodology. The emotions dealt with social interaction categories such as "nice" and "mean." Her main measures required children to act out stories involving these categories, and the conditions for acting out the stories provided varying degrees of environmental support for advanced performance. She also employed a structured interview designed to provide a strong-scalogram test of the developmental sequences she had predicted.
Hand's findings strongly supported the conclusion that preschool children cannot conceive of two or more simultaneous emotions. One of her subjects provided a striking example of preschool children's difficulty in thinking about simultaneous emotions: A girl was shown a story in which one child acted nice and mean simultaneously to another child, and then she was asked to retell the story in her own terms. The girl changed the story, separating it into two distinct stories. First she told about the two children being mean to each other. Then she said, "And a long time later," and began an independent story about the two children being nice to each other. In the story the girl had seen, there was no separation of the nice and mean interactions; instead, they were intertwined and integrated. To understand how the child in the story could experience two emotions, the girl apparently had to distort the story by separating the emotions into two separate stories. Other preschool children showed similar distortions, altering the stories about simultaneous emotions by separating the positive and negative emotions into distinct stories.
Hand's various assessment conditions also demonstrated that the ability to understand that opposite emotions can be experienced simultaneously could appear as early as age 6-7 or as late as age 10-12, depending on the degree of environmental support provided. Thus, social conceptions of emotions seem to show the same pattern as nonsocial conceptions: Variations in both child and environment affect the child's competence.
Hand extended the developmental sequence for nice and mean interactions into the adolescent years (Hand, 1981; Hand and Fischer, 1981). Even under supportive environmental conditions, elementary school children do not seem to be able to integrate nice and mean interactions into general abstract categories, such as "Nice or mean intentions matter more than nice or mean actions."
Hand's categories did not deal with pure emotions but instead involved emotions in social interactions. Indeed, except perhaps for the few "pure" emotions proposed by researchers such as Ekman et al. (1972) and Izard (1982), most human emotions seem to be intimately connected with social situations. Categories for social interactions as well as those for personality descriptions, such as evil, kind, sincere, honest, and responsible are often heavily loaded with emotions. The development of categories for social interactions and personality descriptions appears to follow the same sequence outlined for emotions (Fischer et al., in press; Harter, 1982; Rosenberg, 1979; Selman, 1980):
1.
Preschool children seem to be able to deal with only one concrete category at a time or with a simple relationship between closely related categories, such as that indicated in the statement, "If you are mean to me, I will be mean to you."
2.
Elementary school children begin to be able to describe and use intersections of concrete social and personality categories. For example, by the third or fourth grade, a boy can describe how his best friend generally tries to be nice to him and to share things most of the time, even though he can be mean and stingy when he gets grumpy.
3.
In adolescence, children begin to describe themselves and other people in terms like those of personality theories. They use trait names, such as responsible, introspective, and nonconformist, and eventually they even begin to use ideas similar to the Freudian notion of internal psychological conflict.
In general, then, substantial progress has been made toward describing the development of school-age children's conceptions of emotions and related social and personality categories. As valuable as this progress is, there is much more to emotional development than conceptions of emotions.