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Children’s Understanding of Emotions or Pascal’s “Error”: Review and Prospects

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Handbook of Emotional Development

Abstract

This chapter will address four main questions by conducting a review of the last 40 years of research on children’s understanding of emotions: (1) How can we define and measure Emotion Understanding in children (including a discussion of the relation between theory of mind and Emotion Understanding)? (2) How does Emotion Understanding develop in typically developing children, and what individual differences do we observe (including a discussion of the relation between Emotion Understanding and emotional experience)? (3) How can we explain the development and individual differences in children’s Emotion Understanding? (4) What is the impact of Emotion Understanding, and how can we help children to improve their Emotion Understanding? We will conclude by speculating about the origins of Emotion Understanding in Piagetian first-hand observation and in the testimony provided by other people. More broadly, we will try to show that Blaise Pascal’s dictum – “The heart has its reasons, that reason does not know” (Pascal, Preuve de la religion par le peuple juif, les prophéties et quelques discours, 1662, p. 251) – is wrong, at least for children, if we accept, as many today do, that “reason” stands for understanding and the “heart” stands for emotion.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Piaget’s research on children’s egocentrism with the so-called three mountains task can be considered as one of the precursors of this revolution (Piaget and Inhelder, 1948; Meyer, 1935).

  2. 2.

    Emotions can be conceived as mental states or traits caused by and causing changes in the mind, the body (including the brain), the behavior, and the environment (physical and social). They can be more or less pleasant or unpleasant, moderate or intense, brief or long lasting, attached to one specific object or diffuse, oriented toward the self or toward others, conscious or unconscious, real or apparent, motivational (i.e., action-inducing) or attentional (process-guiding), etc. They can be more or less basic (happy, sad, angry, scared, disgusted, surprised, etc.) mixed, social, and reflective (empathy, kama muta, pride, shame, guilt, etc.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Francisco Pons

  2. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Paul L. Harris

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  1. Francisco Pons
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Correspondence to Francisco Pons .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Rutgers University—Newark, Newark, NJ, USA

    Vanessa LoBue

  2. Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Koraly Pérez-Edgar

  3. Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Kristin A. Buss

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Pons, F., Harris, P.L. (2019). Children’s Understanding of Emotions or Pascal’s “Error”: Review and Prospects. In: LoBue, V., Pérez-Edgar, K., Buss, K.A. (eds) Handbook of Emotional Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17332-6_17

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