The ability to experience mixed emotions in children aged 5 to 10 years

Abstract

The main aim of this study was to examine children?s ability to verbally report experiencing allocentric mixed emotions in 60 children aged 5 to 10 years from three age groups - preschool, second and fourth grade. Five short video-clips from the animated movie ?Dumbo?, in which the protagonist experiences mixed emotions, were used as a stimulus in the study, followed by an interview with the children, while their parents completed the Empathy Quotient questionnaire to assess the child's empathy. The results showed a developmental progression in children?s ability to experience mixed emotions - the fourth-grade students were shown to be more successful compared to the two younger groups. Age was a statistically significant predictor of experiencing mixed emotions, whereas empathy was not. Gender differences in experiencing mixed emotions were not found, but there was a difference in the dynamics of the development of this ability between the genders. Findings were interpreted from a developmental-cognitive perspective, according to which the ability to integrate opposite valence emotions, as two conceptually different representation sets, develops with age.