Understanding Mixed Emotions in Preschool: The Role of a Child’s Cognitive Development

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the relationship between preschool children’s understanding of mixed emotions and indicators of their cognitive development and gender and age. Mixed emotion comprehension is the ability of children to recognize and interpret emotions consisting of two emotions with different valences simultaneously. Assessment of preschool children’s understanding of mixed emotions was carried out using a set of tasks that modified Bylkina and Lucin’s methodology. Nonverbal intelligence was analyzed as indicators of cognitive development and children’s ability to apply dialectical thinking actions, perform formal operations, and predict the development of a situation. A total of 128 older preschool children took part in the study. The empirical study showed that understanding mixed emotions were related to the success of applying dialectical thought operations of transformation and mediation and formal operations of animation and prediction. No relationship was found between understanding mixed emotions and a child’s non-verbal intelligence. No differences were found in the success of understanding mixed emotions between girls and boys.