摘要：Objective: This study examined differences in preschoolers’ prosocial decision-making, emotion understanding in prosocial dilemmas based on the age and emotional conditions of a counterpart child, and the effects of emotion understanding on preschoolers’ prosocial decision-making. Methods: The participants were 114 children (35 3-year-olds, 39 4-year-olds, and 40 5-year-olds). Each child was presented individually with prosocial dilemma tasks and was asked to make decisions and understand emotions (in prosocial and desire-fulfilled situations) based on the emotional conditions of a counterpart child. Results: First, the 4- and 5-year-olds showed more prosocial decision-making in prosocial dilemmas than the 3-year-olds. Prosocial decision-making was significantly lower when the counterpart child was angry, rather than neutral or sadness. Second, in prosocial situations, the 5-year-olds displayed higher positive emotion understanding scores than the 3-year-olds, And in desire-fulfilled situations, the 3-year-olds showed positive emotion understanding, whereas the 4- and 5-year-olds showed negative emotion understanding. Finally, children were more inclined toward prosocial decision-making when they showed higher emotion understanding in prosocial situations, lower emotion understanding in desire-fulfilled situations, and greater age. These were equal to all emotional conditions of the counterpart child. Conclusion: These results suggest that emotion understanding is an important component of social cognition, which effects preschoolers’ prosocial decision-making.
关键词：prosocial decision-making;prosocial dilemmas;emotion understanding;emotional condition of counterpart child
