The purpose of this study was to examine the ability of pre-school children (four to six year-olds) to infer emotions. Subjects were presented a short story and information on a hero's behavior(character), and then were asked to infer the hero's emotions. Theresult of a series of three experiments showed that younger children tended to infer the hero's emotions using only the situational information, while older children could infer the hero's emotions using not only situational information but also information on the hero's behavior (character) or the knowledge of social categories.