Thinking about the past: Early knowledge about links between prior experience, thinking, and emotion

In two studies the authors investigated the situations where 3- to 7-year-o lds and adults (N = 152) will connect a person's current feelings to the pa st, especially to thinking or being reminded about a prior experience. Stud y 1 presented stories featuring a target character who felt sad, mad, or ha ppy after an event in the past and who many days later felt that same negat ive or positive emotion upon seeing a cue related to the prior incident. Fo r some story endings, the character's emotion upon seeing the cue matched, or was congruent, with the current situation, whereas for others, the emoti on mismatched the present circumstances. Participants were asked to explain the cause of each character's current feelings. As a further comparison, c hildren and adults listened to behavior cuing stories and provided explanat ions for characters' present actions. Study 2 presented emotional scenarios that varied by emotion-situation fit (whether the character's emotion matc hed the current situation), person-person fit (whether the character's emot ion matched another person's), and past history information (whether inform ation about the character's past was known). Results showed that although t here were several significant developments with increasing age, even most 3 -year-olds demonstrated some knowledge about connections between past event s and present emotions and between thinking and feeling. Indeed, children 5 years and younger revealed strikingly cogent understanding about historica l-mental influences in certain situations, especially where they had to exp lain why a person, who had experienced a negative event in the past, was cu rrently feeling sad or mad in a positive situation. These findings help und erwrite a more general account of the development of children's coherent un derstandings of life history, mind, and emotion.