Emotion comprehension between 3 and 11 years: Developmental periods and hierarchical organization

Abstract

In the last 20 years, it has been established that children's understanding of emotion changes with age. A review of the extensive literature reveals at least nine distinct components of emotion understanding that have been studied (from the simple attribution of emotions on the basis of facial cues to the emotions involved in moral judgments). Despite this large corpus of findings, there has been little research in which children's understanding of all these various components has been simultaneously assessed. The goal of the current research was to examine the development of these nine components and their interrelationship. For this purpose, 100 children of 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11 years were tested on all nine components. The results show that: (1) children display a clear improvement with age on each component; (2) three developmental phases may be identified, each characterized by the emergence of three of the nine components; (3) correlational relations exist among components within a given phase; and (4) hierarchical relations exist among components from successive phases. The results are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical implications.

Acknowledgments

This study was supported in part by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (No. 8210 – 056618). We would like also to thank all the pupils and school staffs who participated in the study.