年中児・年長児の感情理解能力

主人公の特性情報の統合の様相の観点から

抄録

Readers interpret the emotional states of narrative characters through inference. However,it is not possible to draw appropriate inferences without adequate comprehension of the narratives themselves. Uehara (2009) found that some 5-year-old children had inappropriate comprehension of some narratives and that they persisted in their misunderstandings despite the availability of information concerning the appropriate interpretation. Accordingly, this study investigates narrative comprehension, the source of comprehension, and the process by which information is integrated into an understanding of fictional characters within 4- and 5-year-old children. The results indicate that some 4-year-old children failed to appropriately interpret the emotional states, due to poor narrative comprehension, and that some of the 5-year-old children also failed to appropriately interpret emotional states,despite adequately comprehending the narratives. These results suggest that 1) the ability of 4-year-old children to read and comprehend a narrative is still undeveloped, which leads to misinterpretations of characters' emotional states, and 2) 5-year-old children miscomprehend characters' emotional states because they fail to appreciate the importance of the consistency between the narrative and the characters' emotions.