Abstract

The present study was designed to investigate the development of preschool children's understanding of mixed emotions and to examine the effect of adults' verbal explanation of an emotional story on this development. Eighty children aged 4 and 6 were assigned to two different interventions (an emotion-focused explanation and an event-focused explanation) and tested before and after the intervention using mixed-emotion tasks adapted from Brown and Dunn (1996). Our results showed that the 6-year-olds outperformed the 4-year-olds, but children in both age groups had difficulty understanding mixed emotions. Most importantly, the emotion-focused explanation had a significant effect on children in both age groups: their performance was significantly increased after the emotion-focused intervention but not after the event-focused intervention. Finally, the improvement following the emotion-focused explanation was significantly higher in the 6-year-olds than in the 4-year-olds.