A lag between understanding false beliefs and belief-based emotions in Chinese young children: the effects of material familiarity

ABSTRACT

Understanding emotions based on false beliefs is a necessary component of theory of mind. Previous research has indicated a lag in children’s understanding of belief-based emotions as compared to false beliefs. Experiment 1 involved 83 Chinese 3- to 5-year-old children who were tested for the developmental change of the belief-emotion lag. Experiment 1 identified a lag effect in 3- and 4-year-olds who had better performance at the false belief task than the belief-based emotion understanding task. To further examine the potential influence of material familiarity on the lag, 27 3-year-old children participated in Experiment 2. The results of Experiment 2 showed that 3-year-olds performed slightly better in the belief-based emotion understanding task when familiar materials were replaced by unfamiliar materials. A possible reason for the diminished level of the lag effect was discussed in light of children’s emotional arousal. The findings have practical implications for implementing social and emotional learning programmes that foster young children’s theory of mind understanding.

KEYWORDS:

• False belief
• theory of mind
• emotion understanding
• belief-emotion lag
• young children

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the children who participated in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The tasks were adapted from the ‘other task’ in the study by Bender et al. (2011).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32171061).

Notes on contributors

Heyi Zhang

Heyi Zhang is a lecturer of the Institute (Department) of Early Childhood Education, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University. She obtained her MPhil in Psychology and PhD in Education from the University of Cambridge. Her research interests are mainly concerned with children’s cognitive development, social and emotional development, the role of parents and teachers in supporting child development, etc.

Yuting Xia

Yuting Xia obtained her master’s degree from the Institute of Developmental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University. She is now a psychology teacher at Fuzhou Pingdong Middle School of Fujian Province.

Qinyi Lin

Qinyi Lin is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Developmental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University. Her research interests include mathematical cognition and concept learning.

Yinghe Chen

Yinghe Chen is a professor in Psychology, working at the Institute of Developmental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University. Her research interests focus on children’s cognitive abilities, such as mathematical cognition, executive function, working memory, representation, concept learning, reasoning, etc.