Children's consensual knowledge about the experiential determinants of emotion

Kindergarten, third-, and sixth-grade children were given vignettes describing experiences that were likely to produce emotional states, and their consensus about the probable affective reaction was determined. A sample of eight social and personal (private) experiences was utilized in the vignettes: success, failure, dishonesty (caught or not caught), experiencing nurturance or aggression, and experiencing justified or unjustified punishment. The potential affective reactions that children were asked to choose among included happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and neutral affect. There were no sex differences. Children of all ages agreed that relatively simple experiences such as success and nurturance would elicit a happy reaction. For other categories of experience, multiple consensuses appeared for more than one affective reaction. There were developmental differences in the affective reactions anticipated to five of the eight experience categories. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive and social learning determinants of knowledge about the experimental antecedents of emotion for oneself and others.