This study examined emotion understanding and reconciliation in 47 (24 girls) 4–6-year-old preschool children. Participants first completed emotion recognition tasks and then answered questions regarding reconciliation tendencies and affective perspective-taking in a series of overt and relational aggressive conflict scenarios. Children’s teachers reported their overt aggression, relational aggression, and prosocial behaviors in daily life. The results indicated that children’s emotion recognition ability was associated with their reconciliation tendency in both types of conflict scenarios. Furthermore, children’s affective perspective-taking in conflicts was associated with their reconciliation tendencies in the overt aggression conflict scenarios, but not in the relational aggression conflict scenarios. Additionally, we found that children’s affective perspective-taking in overt aggression conflict scenarios was associated with their daily prosocial behaviors. The results suggest that the ability of detecting and recognizing others’ emotions may facilitate conflict reconciliation and positive peer interactions.
Baron-CohenS. (2002). The extreme male brain theory of autism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6(6), 248–254.
3.
BelacchiC.FarinaE. (2010). Prosocial/hostile roles and emotion comprehension in preschoolers. Aggressive Behavior, 36(6), 371–389.
4.
BelacchiC.FarinaE. (2012). Feeling and thinking of others: Affective and cognitive Empathy and emotion comprehension in prosocial/hostile preschoolers. Aggressive Behavior, 38(2), 150–165.
5.
BowieB. H. (2010). Understanding the gender differences in pathways to social deviancy: Relational aggression and emotion regulation. Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, 24(1), 27–37.
6.
ButovskayaM.VerbeekP.LjungbergT.LunardiniA. (2000). A multicultural view of peacemaking among young children. In AureliF.de WaalF. B. M. (Eds), Natural conflict resolution (pp. 243–258). Berkeley: University of California Press.
7.
CamrasL. A.PerlmanS. B.FriesA. B. W.PollakS. D. (2006). Post-institutionalized Chinese and Eastern European children: Heterogeneity in the development of emotion understanding. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 30(3), 193–199.
8.
CassidyK. W.WernerR. S.RourkeM.ZubernisL. S.BalaramanG. (2003). The relationship between psychological understanding and positive social behaviors. Social Development, 12(2), 198–221.
9.
CohenJ. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
10.
CrickN. R. (1996). The role of overt aggression, relational aggression, and prosocial behavior in the prediction of children’s future social adjustment. Child Development, 67(5), 2317–2327.
11.
CrickN. R.GrotpeterJ. K. (1995). Relational aggression, gender, and social- psychological adjustment. Child Development, 66(3), 710–722.
12.
CrickN. R.OstrovJ. M.BurrJ. E.Cullerton-SenC.Jansen-YehE.RalstonP. (2006). A longitudinal study of relational and physical aggression in preschool. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 27(3), 254–268.
13.
DenhamS. A.CaverlyS.SchmidtM.BlairK.DeMulderE.CaalS.MasonT. (2002). Preschool understanding of emotions: Contributions to classroom anger and aggression. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 43(7), 901–916.
14.
DenhamS. A.CouchoudE. A. (1990). Young preschoolers understanding of emotions. Child Study Journal, 20(3), 171–192.
15.
de WaalF. B. M.van RoosmalenA. (1979). Reconciliation and consolation among chimpanzees. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 5(1), 55–66.
16.
de WiedM.BranjeS. J. T.MeeusW. H. J. (2007). Empathy and conflict resolution in friendship relations among adolescents. Aggressive Behavior, 33(1), 48–55.
17.
DunnJ.CuttingA. L. (1999). Understanding others, and individual differences in friendship interactions in young children. Social Development, 8(2), 201–219.
18.
DunnJ.HerreraC. (1997). Conflict resolution with friends, siblings, and mothers: A developmental perspective. Aggressive Behavior, 23(5), 343–357.
19.
EnsorR.HughesC. (2005). More than talk: Relations between emotion understanding and positive behaviour in toddlers. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 23(3), 343–363.
20.
FaulF.ErdfelderE.BuchnerA.LangA. G. (2009). Statistical power analyses using G*Power 3.1: Tests for correlation and regression analyses. Behavior Research Methods, 41(4), 1149–1160.
21.
FujisawaK. K.KutsukakeN.HasegawaT. (2006). Peacemaking and consolation in Japanese preschoolers witnessing peer aggression. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 120(1), 48–57.
22.
GutiérrezM.EscartíA.PascualC. (2011). Relationships among empathy, prosocial behavior, aggressiveness, self-efficacy and pupils’ personal and social responsibility. Psicothema, 23(1), 13–19.
23.
HoffmanM. (1984). Interaction of affect and cognition in empathy. In IzardC. E.KaganJ.ZajoncR. B. (Eds.), Emotions, cognition, and behavior (pp. 103–131). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
24.
IzardC.FineS.SchultzD.MostowA.AckermanB.YoungstromE. (2001). Emotion knowledge as a predictor of social behavior and academic competence in children at risk. Psychological Science, 12(1), 18–23.
25.
KaukiainenA.BjörkqvistK.LagerspetzK.ÖstermanK.SalmivalliC.RothbergS.AhlbomA. (1999). The relationships between social intelligence, empathy, and three types of aggression. Aggressive Behavior, 25(2), 81–89.
26.
KnafoA.SteinbergT.GoldnerI. (2011). Children’s low affective perspective-taking ability is associated with low self-initiated pro-sociality. Emotion, 11(1), 194–198.
27.
LjungbergT.HorowitzL.JanssonL.WestlundK.ClarkeC. (2005). Communicative factors, conflict progression, and use of reconciliatory strategies in pre-school boys-a series of random events or a sequential process?Aggressive Behavior, 31(4), 303–323.
28.
MaltiT.KellerM. (2009). The relation of elementary-school children’s externalizing behaviour to emotion attributions, evaluation of consequences, and moral reasoning. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 6(5), 592–614.
29.
MarshA. A.KozakM. N.AmbadyN. (2007). Accurate identification of fear facial expressions predicts prosocial behavior. Emotion, 7(2), 239–251.
30.
MillerA. L.FineS. E.GouleyK. K.SeiferR.DicksteinS.ShieldsA. (2006). Showing and telling about emotions: Interrelations between facets of emotional competence and associations with classroom adjustment in Head Start preschoolers. Cognition & Emotion, 20(8), 1170–1192.
31.
MostowA. J.IzardC. E.FineS.TrentacostaC. J. (2002). Modeling emotional, cognitive, and behavioral predictors of peer acceptance. Child Development, 73(6), 1775–1787.
32.
NelsonN. L.RussellJ. A. (2013). Universality revisited. Emotion Review, 5(1), 8–15.
33.
PonsF.HarrisP. (2000). Test of Emotion Comprehension-TEC. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
34.
PonsF.HarrisP. L.de RosnayM. (2004). Emotion comprehension between 3 and 11 years: Developmental periods and hierarchical organization. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 1(2), 127–152.
SackinS.ThelenE. (1984). An ethological study of peaceful associative outcomes to conflict in preschool-children. Child Development, 55(3), 1098–1102.
37.
SallquistJ.EisenbergN.SpinradT. L.EggumN. D.GaertnerB. M. (2009). Assessment of preschoolers’ positive empathy: Concurrent and longitudinal relations with positive emotion, social competence, and sympathy. Journal of Positive Psychology, 4(3), 223–233.
38.
SejaA. L.RussS. W. (1999). Children’s fantasy play and emotional understanding. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology, 28(2), 269–277.
39.
SotoJ. A.PerezC. R.KimY. H. (2011). Is expressive suppression always associated with poorer psychological functioning? A cross-cultural comparison between European Americans and Hong Kong Chinese. Emotion, 11(6), 1450–1455.
40.
TrentacostaC. J.FineS. E. (2010). Emotion knowledge, social competence, and behavior problems in childhood and adolescence: A meta-analytic review. Social Development, 19(1), 1–29.
41.
WangQ. (2008). Emotion knowledge and autobiographical memory across the preschool years: A cross-cultural longitudinal investigation. Cognition, 108(1), 117–135.
42.
WestlundK.HorowitzL.JanssonL.LjungbergT. (2008). Age effects and gender differences on post-conflict reconciliation in preschool children. Behaviour, 145(11), 1525–1556.
43.
WernerR. S.CassidyK. W.JulianoM. (2006). The role of social-cognitive abilities in preschoolers’ aggressive behavior, British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 24(4), 775–799.
44.
WidenS. C.RussellJ. A. (2010). Children’s scripts for social emotions: Causes and consequences are more central than are facial expressions. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 28(3), 565–581.
45.
WilhelmM. O.BekkersR. (2010). Helping behavior, dispositional empathic concern, and the principle of care. Social Psychology Quarterly, 73(1), 11–32.
46.
WoodsS.WolkeD. (2004). Direct and relational bullying among primary school children and academic achievement. Journal of School Psychology, 42(2), 135–155.
47.
YikM.WidenS. C.RussellJ. A. (2013). The within-subjects design in the study of facial expressions. Cognition & Emotion, 27(6), 1062–1072.
48.
ZhangW. X.JiL. Q.GongX. L.ZhangQ.WangY. W. (2003). A longitudinal study on the development of 3- to 4-year-old children’s aggressive behavior. Psychological Science [in Chinese], 26(1), 49–52.
