Abstract
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.
Highlights
This study explores children’s capacity to comprehend that the emotions expressed in pretend play contexts may have playful intentions
When type of emotion was taken into account, age differences were observed for both sadness and anger, the older children doing better than the younger children
When we compared children’s scores for each type of emotion at each age group to the expected chance level (1 point), we observed that older children obtained scores above chance in both emotions, while young children scored above chance for sadness (Z = 3.889, p < 0.001) but not for anger (p = 0.414)
Summary
This study explores children’s capacity to comprehend that the emotions expressed in pretend play contexts may have playful intentions. This research focuses on how the ability to discriminate facial expressions of emotion is developed, but with particular emphasis on the more specific ability of detecting pretend emotion (or emotions simulated in pretend play contexts), so as to understand how children explain their interpretations of pretend facial expressions. This emotional recognition is studied in the context of pretend play, where the simulation of emotions often occurs in childhood. We will discuss these aspects of the study in more detail
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