Serrat Elisabet, Amadó Anna, Rostan Carles, Caparrós Beatriz, Sidera Francesc
Department of Psychology, University of Girona, Girona, Spain.
Front Psychol. 2020 Nov 30;11:602385. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.602385. eCollection 2020.
This study aims to further understand children's capacity to identify and reason about pretend emotions by analyzing which sources of information they take into account when interpreting emotions simulated in pretend play contexts. A total of 79 children aged 3 to 8 participated in the final sample of the study. They were divided into the young group (ages 3 to 5) and the older group (6 to 8). The children were administered a facial emotion recognition task, a pretend emotions task, and a non-verbal cognitive ability test. In the pretend emotions task, the children were asked whether the protagonist of silent videos, who was displaying pretend emotions (pretend anger and pretend sadness), was displaying a real or a pretend emotion, and to justify their answer. The results show significant differences in the children's capacity to identify and justify pretend emotions according to age and type of emotion. The data suggest that young children recognize pretend sadness, but have more difficulty detecting pretend anger. In addition, children seem to find facial information more useful for the detection of pretend sadness than pretend anger, and they more often interpret the emotional expression of the characters in terms of pretend play. The present research presents new data about the recognition of negative emotional expressions of sadness and anger and the type of information children take into account to justify their interpretation of pretend emotions, which consists not only in emotional expression but also contextual information.
本研究旨在通过分析儿童在解释假装游戏情境中模拟的情绪时所考虑的信息来源，进一步了解他们识别假装情绪并进行推理的能力。共有79名3至8岁的儿童参与了该研究的最终样本。他们被分为幼儿组（3至5岁）和年长组（6至8岁）。这些儿童接受了面部情绪识别任务、假装情绪任务和非语言认知能力测试。在假装情绪任务中，儿童被问及无声视频中表现出假装情绪（假装愤怒和假装悲伤）的主角是在表现真实情绪还是假装情绪，并要求他们为自己的答案提供理由。结果显示，儿童在识别和解释假装情绪的能力方面，根据年龄和情绪类型存在显著差异。数据表明，幼儿能够识别假装悲伤，但在检测假装愤怒方面存在更多困难。此外，儿童似乎发现面部信息对于检测假装悲伤比检测假装愤怒更有用，并且他们更经常从假装游戏的角度来解释角色的情感表达。本研究提供了关于悲伤和愤怒等负面情绪表达的识别以及儿童为解释假装情绪而考虑的信息类型的新数据，这些信息不仅包括情感表达，还包括情境信息。
