Mind and emotion: Children's understanding of the emotional consequences of beliefs and desires

Abstract

We investigated preschool children's understanding of mind and emotion by examining their understanding that emotions such as happiness and surprise depend on the actor's desires and beliefs. We report four investigations: a study of 3‐year‐olds' ratings of actors' happiness and surprise, a natural language analysis of adults' use of the word surprise in conversation to a preschool child, and two studies of 3‐and 4‐year‐olds' abilities to explain the causes of desire‐dependent and belief‐dependent emotional reactions, such as happiness and surprise respectively. We demonstrate that children as young as 3 years appropriately understand the relevant mental states underlying happiness, sadness, surprise and curiosity, although they misunderstand the usage of some related lexical terms, especially surprise. The findings are discussed with regard to the early development of children's understanding of emotion and their understanding of mind, including children's early understanding of the notion of belief and their ability to distinguish beliefs from desires.