Are You Really Happy? Children’s Understanding of Real vs. Pretend Emotions

Abstract

This paper studies children’s capacity to understand that the emotions displayed in pretend play contexts do not necessarily correspond to internal emotions, and that pretend emotions may create false beliefs in an observer. A new approach is taken by asking children about pretend emotions in terms of pretence-reality instead of appearance-reality. A total of 37 four-year-olds and 33 six-year-olds were asked to participate in tasks where they had to pretend an emotion or where they were told stories in which the protagonists pretended an emotion. In each task children were asked: a) if the pretend emotion was real or just pretended and b) if an observer would think that the emotional expression was real or just pretended. Results showed that four-year-olds are capable of understanding that pretend emotions are not necessarily real. Overall, six-year-olds performed better than younger children. Furthermore, both age groups showed difficulty in understanding that pretend emotions might unintentionally mislead an observer. Results are discussed in relation to previous research on children’s ability to understand pretend play and the emotional appearance-reality distinction.

Identifying Emotional Expressions: Children’s Reasoning About Pretend Emotions of Sadness and Anger

“…Previous literature has shown that young children are capable of realizing other children may pretend to be sad for playful reasons (see Sidera et al, 2013). The current study found that this knowledge develops gradually between the ages of 4 and 6, and is well-established from the age of 6 years, as all children in the older group recognized the expression of pretend sadness.…”

“…Children's ability to understand that the real emotion of a person may differ from their emotional expression has often been studied in contexts of deception (see Sidera et al, 2013). Children begin to control their emotional expressions at the age of 4; however, at that age they are not yet able to deceive other people through emotional expression.…”

“…So Mizokawa (2011) suggested that the context of pretend play facilitates children's understanding of pretend crying. Furthermore, the study by Sidera et al (2013) showed that at the age of 4, despite not mastering the distinction between internal and external emotion, most children understand the playful intentionality of emotions expressed in pretend play contexts. Specifically, Sidera et al found that 4-year-old children are capable of understanding that when a character, or themselves, show a sad expression in a pretend play context, this person is just pretending, and is not really sad.…”

Understanding Pretend Emotions in Children Who Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing

“…The literature suggests that the explicit understanding of pretend emotions (e.g., understanding that a child is crying because it is a part of a game and not because he or she is actually sad) is difficult before the age of 4 years, and develops between the ages of 4-6 years (Mizokawa, 2011;Peterson & Wellman, 2009). However, grasping the implications of pretend emotions for the beliefs of observers (people can be deceived about the real emotions of a pretender) continues to be difficult after the age of 6 (Sidera, Amadó, & Serrat, 2013).…”

“…This developmental progression led us to conduct a comparison of three age groups in the present study. However previous studies evaluating hearing children's understanding of pretend emotions used narratives with pictures with a high linguistic load (Mizokawa, 2011;Sidera et al, 2013). This method is not appropriate for children who are DHH, as evaluations of ToM and emotion understanding require a technique with lower linguistic demands such as silent videos.…”