Abstract
This study investigated how children's emotional understanding differs depending on whether (1) the central person in a time-sequence story is oneself or another person, and (2) the type of object that causes the negative emotion in the story is a human or an object. In Experiment I, participants between the ages of 3 and 5 years inferred the causes of emotional occurrences described in four picture stories. In Experiment II the experimental conditions were closer to reality, so that 4- and 5-year old participants could actively and freely associate the understanding of temporally extended emotions with the current emotion, in four different puppet shows. The results showed first that whatever the main character was in the story (self vs. others), preschoolers could infer the cause of emotional occurrences, regardless of their age. In addition, children in the younger age group understood that temporally extended emotions affect the current emotion, if the cause of the emotion was a human.
