Emotional understanding: A matter of age,dimension, and point of view

Emotional understanding is one important aspect of emotional development. Following previous research that suggested that the child's understanding of feelings in self and others increases in complexity with age, we investigated the way that general age trends must be qualified by reference to specific aspects of emotion and to the perspective-taking requirements of the task. In the present study, 70 children (34 boys, 36 girls), chosen from one of four grades (kindergarten, third, sixth, and ninth), were intervewed about 4 dimensions of emotional understanding: Knowledge, Causality, Control, and Multiple Feelings. Children's understanding was assessed from 3 diffferent points of view: Feeling in the self, feelings in the parent, and how the parent understood the child's feelings. As in other studies, older children tended to use increasingly abstract and complex criteria in their understanding of feelings. There was considerable cross-dimension consistency in level of response, although slightly digfferent patterns of intercorrelations were obtained at different ages. Questions requiring two perspectives were more difficult, regardless of whether they focused on self or on others. There was an age X dimension X point of view intreaction, such that the difference between self and other emotional undeestanding increased across age groups for the Knowledge dimension and decreased for the remaining 3 dimensions.