Preschoolers' Developing Conceptions of Their Own Emotion (Affect, Object Relations, Psychotherapy, Piaget).

Abstract

Event theory, a view of the basic categories used in early experience processing, served as a framework for examining preschoolers' conceptions of their own emotion. The relationship of event theory to Piagetian and object relations theory, and to several areas of current developmental research, was discussed. This study replicates and extends previous work in which preschoolers' views on two topics were used to articulate three developmental stages. The two topics were children's views on: (1) locus of their emotion while it occurred, and (2) how the interviewer could become aware of their emotion if present while it occurred. Stage 1 children gave only event-bound answers for both topics, Stage 2 children gave a mixture of event-bound and mature responses, and Stage 3 children gave consistently mature responses on both topics. In semi-structured interviews, 59 preschoolers of mixed racial and socioeconomic background discussed two happy, two frightening, and two anger situations of their own choosing, with a focus on the two topics described above. A robust Age-Stage relationship for all three affects supports interpretation of the stages as a developmental sequence. An absence of significant statistical relationship between Stage and Sex, Affect, or Subject Activity Level (SAL: subject Active relative to Object versus subject Passive relative to Object), provides support for viewing event-bound conceptualization as a broad, formal aspect of early ideas on one's own emotion, which is not subject to simple influence from such factors. Possible influences on the type of event-bound answer given about the location of emotion while it occurs (in subject's Action, in Object interacted with, in Event as a whole) were also examined. Support for viewing all three response types as reflections of a single, developmentally coherent mode of experience processing was provided by demonstration of an absence of significant difference in the proportion of these response types between Stage 1 answers and the remaining event-bound answers given in Stage 2. The influence of affective valence and of SAL on the response type chosen was also examined, with results indicating an interesting pattern of interaction between these two variables.