Motiv Emot (2006) 30:237–247DOI 10.1007/s11031-006-9037-6

ORIGINAL PAPER

The Role of Basic, Self-Conscious and Self-Conscious EvaluativeEmotions in Children’s Memory and Understanding of EmotionDenise Davidson

Published online: 8 August 2006C© Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006

Abstract In past research, emotion has been classified asbasic, self-conscious or self-conscious evaluative, with eachtype of emotion being progressively more difficult for chil-dren to understand (Lewis, M. (2000a). In M. Lewis & J. M.Haviland-Jones (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (2nd ed., pp.265–280), New York, NY: The Guilford Press). Althoughresearchers have examined children’s understanding of indi-vidual emotions (e.g., guilt), researchers have not assessedchildren’s understanding and memory for emotions basedon this classification. In the present research, 6-, 8- and10-year-old children’s memory and understanding of ba-sic, self-conscious and self-conscious evaluative emotionswere examined. Although a memory advantage was foundfor emotions, this effect was less so for the younger childrenand less so for non-basic emotions. In fact, 6-year-old chil-dren and, to a lesser extent 8-year-old children, were morelikely than older children to recall self-conscious and self-conscious evaluative emotions with basic emotion labels, andwere more likely to explain them using basic emotion labels.Overall, negative emotions (e.g., mad, guilt) were better re-called than positive emotions (e.g., happy, pride), regardlessof type of emotion. Gender differences were found as girlswere more likely to remember emotion than boys, especiallywhen the emotion action was specifically labeled and a fe-male character experienced it.

Proportions of this research were presented at the biennial meetingof the Society for Research in Child Development (2005), Atlanta,Georgia and the meeting of the Cognitive Development Society (2005),San Diego, CA.

D. Davidson (�)Department of Psychology, Loyola University Chicago,6525 N. Sheridan Road, Chicago, IL 60626, USAe-mail: ddavids@luc.edu

Keywords Basic . Self-conscious . Self-consciousevaluative emotions . Memory and emotion . Emotiondevelopment

Models of emotion often make a distinction between basicemotions, such as happiness or sadness, and self-conscious(e.g., embarrassment, envy) and self-conscious evaluative(e.g., pride, guilt) emotions. According to Lewis (2000a)and others (e.g., Ekman, 1992; Izard, 1992), there is only alimited number of basic or primary emotions. These emo-tions, which include happiness, anger, sadness, fear, surpriseand disgust, are characterized by their early appearance inlife and by having prototypical and universal facial expres-sions. Although not all agree on these assertions (see, e.g.,Draghi-Lorenz, Reddy, & Costello, 2001; Ortony & Turner,1990 for discussions), there is evidence that basic emotionsare extremely common, both across cultures and among peo-ple within a culture (e.g., Ekman, 1992; Fischer & Tangney,1995). In contrast, self-conscious emotions show weaker ev-idence of universality, with antecedents and consequencesoften differing across cultures (Lewis, 2000b). Furthermore,self-conscious emotions do not appear to have prototypicaland universally recognized distinct facial expressions (e.g.,Izard, 1992; Tracy & Robins, 2004). Lewis (2000b) suggests,however, that the major difference between basic and selfconscious emotions is that the latter require more complexprocessing of information, particularly social information,than basic emotions.

Although all emotions may involve social relationships,self-conscious emotions are rooted in social relations, notonly in social interaction between people, but also theevaluation of, and judgment of, individuals by themselvesand others (Lewis, 2000b; Tangney & Fischer, 1995; Tracy& Robins, 2004). Lewis (2000b), however, makes a furtherdistinction between self-conscious and self-conscious

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evaluative emotions. Self-conscious emotions (e.g., non-evaluative embarrassment, envy) require the ability toform stable self-representations (me) and to focus attentionon those representations or to self-reflect. Although self-conscious emotions are believed to depend on the capacityto represent oneself and another in a common space, and tobe concerned with the views of another, they do not require,as self-conscious evaluative emotions, the additional needto compare oneself, or one’s behavior, with internalizedcultural standards, rules or goals (Lewis, 2000b). Thesestandards, rules, or goals often vary by the standards of one’sculture, and must be incorporated into a child’s view of theworld at some point during development (Lewis, 2000b;Stipek, Recchia, & McClintic, 1992). For example, shameis described in many forms in the Chinese culture, but not inthe American culture (e.g., Frank, Harvey, & Verdun, 2000;Hong & Chiu, 1992).

In addition to Lewis (2000b), who distinguishes betweenself-conscious and self-conscious evaluative emotions, Izard,Ackerman, and Schultz (1999) include shame, guilt andpride, but not embarrassment or envy, within the category of“cognition-dependent” self-conscious emotions. Likewise,Tracy and Robins (2004) suggest that the key distinctivefeatures of embarrassment are its relative cognitive simplic-ity and the fact that attentional focus is directed toward thepublic self as opposed to the internal self or self-concept.Thus, it is not surprising that basic emotions are expressedearlier, and appear to be perceived and understood earlierin life, than self-conscious emotions. Lewis (2000a) has ar-gued that while all basic emotions appear during the firstyear of life, the emergence of self-conscious emotions doesnot appear until later, in the second half of the second year.Self-conscious evaluative emotions appear even later, usu-ally not until about three years of age. Of course, children’sunderstanding of these emotions may not begin until later inchildhood.

Although the number of developmental studies on chil-dren’s understanding of self-conscious and self-consciousevaluative emotions per se is limited, several studies haveassessed children’s ability to define and describe individ-ual emotions. For example, Griffin (1995) asked 4-, 6-, and8-year-old children to define and describe embarrassment,pride and shame with questions such as, “What does it meanto be embarrassed (feel proud, feel ashamed)?” and “Whatis happening when you are embarrassed (feeling proud, feel-ing ashamed)?” Additionally, Griffin assessed three featuresshe believed to be important in children’s understanding ofthese emotions: children’s awareness of the presence of an-other person, the person becoming aware that he or she is thecenter of attention, and the person’s feeling that he or she isbeing judged.

By asking children to define and describe these emotions,Griffin (1995) was able to assess a predicted pattern of

emotion development: that is, prior to age 5 or 6, children’sunderstanding of emotions is believed to be pre-intentional,with children explaining the emotion by exclusive referenceto the behavioral event (e.g., Harter, 1999). By 6 or 7 yearsof age, children can explain emotion by reference to oneinternal state; for example, they may be aware of theintentions of the actor or the observer, but not both. It is notuntil 8 or 9 years of age that children explain emotion interms of multiple intentional states, and by describing boththe role of person experiencing the emotion and the role ofthe other person in witnessing the emotion.

In order to fully asses this developmental pattern, Griffin(1995) also asked children to put themselves in hypotheti-cal situations that might elicit these emotions. For example,for embarrassment, children were asked to pretend that theywere the actor in a school play and to imagine that duringthe play they forgot their lines. Children were asked howthey would feel in this situation and what they thought otherchildren would think about them, which in turn provided anindex of social interpretation. Griffin’s (1995) results showedthat the majority of 8-year-olds defined embarrassment interms of a social standard violation that was witnessed orjudged by the audience. The majority of these older chil-dren also attributed negative judgments by the audience onthe school play task. In addition, the 8-year-olds referencedboth the individuals and the role of the audience when askedto define embarrassment (e.g., “You do something silly andother people laugh at you and you don’t want to know.,”p. 225). In contrast, only a small percentage of the 6-year-olds, and none of the 4-year-olds, referenced both compo-nents of embarrassment (the role of the person and the roleof the audience). In fact, most 4-year-olds were just as likelyto report that they felt sad, mad, scared and even happy whenexplaining an embarrassing situation.

Additional research assessing school-age children’sunderstanding of guilt and shame found that while most8 to 11-year-olds could describe situations in which they feltguilty or ashamed, only the 11-year-olds were able to see howa shame-producing event could alter one’s self-concept (e.g.,Ferguson, Stegge, Miller, & Olsen, 1999). Furthermore,only the older group saw the desire to confess as applicableto guilt feelings. This latter finding is consistent with youngchildren’s understanding of moral transgressions, as youngchildren have been found to experience guilt, but only whencaught (Barden, Zelko, Duncan, & Masters, 1980).

Nevertheless, much of the previous work on emotional de-velopment has assessed children’s understanding of emotionby asking children to report personal instances of these emo-tions, or to report how they would feel if certain emotionalevents occurred to them. However, it is possible that childrenmay feel uncomfortable reporting such emotional experi-ences, particularly negative ones, about themselves. In orderto circumvent this problem, in the present research children

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were presented with artist-drawn, illustrated stories in whichthe protagonists or other characters in the stories experience,at some point in the story, each of these emotions. Chil-dren were asked why the story character experienced eachbasic, self-conscious and self-conscious evaluative emotionappearing in the stories.

The present research also examined younger and olderchildren’s memory for these emotions because past researchhas suggested that children’s memory for emotional eventsmay differ from their memory for non-emotional events. Forexample, autobiographical and narrative studies have shownthat even preschool age children readily recall emotionally-laden events from their own lives, using emotion labels todescribe the events (e.g., Fivush, Berlin, Sales, Mennuti-Washburn, & Cassidy, 2003; Lagattuta & Wellman, 2002;Sales, Fivush, & Peterson, 2003). Recent research has alsofound that 6- to 11-year-old children recalled emotional in-formation better than non-emotional information from sto-ries. In fact, 6-year-old children recalled emotional informa-tion almost as well as the older children (Davidson, Luo,& Burden, 2001). However, in Davidson et al. (2001), chil-dren were asked to recall only basic emotions. It is not clearwhether similar memory advantages would be found for self-conscious types of emotions.

Other factors, such as the valence of emotion, may affecthow emotional information is remembered in the present re-search. Past studies have shown that children and parentsare more likely to talk about negative emotions than positiveemotions when specifically asked to reminisce about the past(e.g., Fivush, 1991). In fact, in analyzing general conversa-tions from large languages samples, it was found that parents’and children’s discourse about negative emotions included alarger emotion vocabulary, more open-ended questions, andmore talk about other people than did conversations aboutpositive emotions (Lagattuta & Wellman, 2002). Accordingto some theorists, recall of negative emotions may serve anadaptive function for the individual. For example, when aperson feels embarrassed, guilty, or ashamed then that eventmay provide the person with important information for futurebehavior and decisions (Tracy & Robins, 2004).

Additionally, boys’ and girls’ recall of positive and neg-ative emotions was compared, in part because parent-childconversations about emotional events can differ based onthe gender of the child. For example, Fivush et al. (2003)found that mothers are more likely to reminisce in moreelaborative and evaluative ways about emotions with theirdaughters than with their sons. According to Fivush et al.(2003), girls are socialized into a more embellished andemotionally laden sense of self through their conversationswith their mothers. Such gender differences, in turn, mayaffect children’s memory of emotion in situations not onlyabout themselves, but others. Gender differences may alsobe found in the recall of specific emotions, as past research

has found heightened levels of guilt and shame in evenpreschool-age girls (Zahn-Waxler, Cole, & Barrett, 1991.

Finally, children’s memory for emotion behaviors specifi-cally labeled (experiment one) and not (experiment two) wasassessed. Labeling of emotion has been shown to play animportant role in children’s identification of emotion, as pre-vious research has shown that young children’s identificationof emotion is often much better when a label is provided thanwhen just a facial expression is provided (Widen & Russell,2004). However, Widen and Russell (2004) have shown thatyoung children sometimes exhibit a “behavioral superiorityeffect” by using the behavioral consequences of the emotionto identify the emotion. In this case, children’s use ofthe behavioral consequences led to better understandingof emotion than either labeling the emotion or providingfacial expressions (Widen & Russell, 2004). These findingssuggest the need in the present research to assess children’smemory for the emotion behavior separately from theemotion label.

Experiment 1: Recall of non-emotional andemotional information from stories

Method

Participants

Fifty-four children participated: 18 six-year-olds (meanage 6.5, age range 6.0–6.10), 18 eight-year-olds (mean age8.3, age range 7.11–8.7) and 18 ten-year-olds (mean age10.4, age range 9.11–10.8). Two 6-year-olds were replacedbecause they did not remember both stories, and two6-year-olds, one 8-year-old and two 10-year-old childrenwere replaced because they were absent on the second day oftesting. Children were drawn from lower-middle to middleclass neighborhoods in Chicago and Evanston, Illinois.Sixty-one percent of the children were European American,22% were Latin American, 9% were African American andthe remaining were either Asian American (3%) or of Mid-dle Eastern descent (4%). In each age group, approximatelyhalf the children were male and half were female.

Materials and procedure

Two stories, one with a male protagonist and the other with afemale protagonist, were used in the present research. Thesestories are provided in Table A1 of the Appendix. Both sto-ries consisted of six non-emotion actions (e.g., “After Jimmydid his homework he watched a little tv.”), and six emotionactions and their labels (e.g., “Bill showed Jimmy his newbaseball. Jimmy wished he had a baseball like his friend’s andwas jealous of him.”). Every behavioral action, emotional

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and non-emotional, was illustrated with an artist-drawn pic-ture of the activity. These illustrations were each 20 × 28 cmand were in color. Each illustration was shown to the childrenas the corresponding story action was read. Using Lewis’(2000b) classification of emotion, in each story two of theemotion actions depicted basic emotions (happy and mad),two depicted self-conscious emotions (embarrassment andenvy) and two depicted self conscious evaluative emotions(guilt and pride).

Individually, in a quiet room of their school, childrenwere read a practice story followed by the reading of theexperimental stories. Presentation of the experimental storieswas counterbalanced across children. Immediately after eachstory was read, children were asked to recall all they couldfrom the story. No specific memory cues were provided,although children were encouraged to remember as much aspossible with cues such as “Can you tell me anything elsethat happened in the story?”

For both days of testing, experimenters had a list of all thestory sentences and checked them off as the child recalledthem. Experimenters were instructed to cross out any part ofthe sentence not recalled by the child, to write down any in-formation that was not in the story but was given by the child,and to write down any changes the child made to the sentence.Coding was completed on the emotion behaviors recalled,the emotion labels recalled and the non-emotion behaviorsrecalled. Two coders coded the data and agreement betweenthem was approximately 94%. Disagreements were resolvedthrough discussions. Although behaviors were coded correctif just the gist of the behavior was recalled; in general, whenchildren recalled the non-emotion and emotion behaviorsthey recalled them verbatim or nearly verbatim. As will bediscussed, when children changed the sentence they usuallydid so by changing the self-conscious or self-conscious eval-uative (emotion) label to a more basic emotion label. Onlyemotion labels recalled correctly (e.g., recalled as guilty notsad) were scored as correctly recalled.

Results

Mean proportions of non-emotion behaviors, emotion be-haviors and emotion labels correctly recalled from the storiesare shown in Table 1. Mixed-model analysis of variance wasconducted on the data, with between-subjects variables age(6, 8, 10) and gender, and within-subjects variables story,retention interval (immediate, delayed) type of information(non-emotion behavior, emotion behavior, emotion label forthe behavior), and item (the six non-emotion behaviors, thesix emotion behaviors, and the six emotion labels). Althoughemotion behaviors and emotion labels were not completelyindependent of each other, it was possible that children wouldrecall the emotion behavior but not the label, and vice ver-sus, necessitating the need to look at these factors sepa-

Table 1 Mean proportion of non-emotional behaviors, emotionalbehaviors, and emotion labels correctly recalled in experiment 1

Type of informationNon-emotional Emotional

Age behavior behavior Emotion label

Day One6-year-olds .22 (.20) .45 (.14) .14 (.14)8-year-olds .45 (.25) .62 (.21) .33 (.17)10-year-olds .62 (.18) .87 (.13) .52 (.25)

Day Two6-year-olds .19 (.16) .42 (.15) .13 (.13)8-year-olds .38 (.25) .56 (.23) .26 (.23)10-year-olds .53 (.20) .80 (.12) .51 (.19)

Note. Standard deviations are in parentheses.

rately. Additionally, individual items were analyzed in orderto assess whether some emotions were better recalled thanothers, including differences between the recall of basic,self-conscious and self-conscious evaluative emotions.

In conducting this analysis, several significant results wereobtained. These results are presented in terms of the follow-ing key questions: does the type of information (non-emotionbehavior, emotion behavior, emotion label) affect recall; doesthe type of emotion (basic, self-conscious, self-consciousevaluative) or valence of emotion affect recall; does retentioninterval affect recall, and are there age or gender differencesin recall?

In terms of type of information recalled (i.e., non-emotionbehaviors, emotion behaviors, emotion label), a main effectof type of information was found, F(2,100) = 79.52, p <

.0001, partial η2 = .61, as were a type of information ×item two-way interaction, F(10,500) = 15.28, p < .0001,partial η2 = .23, and a type of information × age × itemthree-way interaction, F(20,500) = 2.06, p < .005, partialη2 = .08. Simple main effects analysis and paired-samplest-tests, with familywise error rate controlled for by usingHolm’s sequential Bonferroni approach, were conducted onthe significant results. As shown in Table 1, overall, emotionbehaviors were better recalled than non-emotion behaviorsand emotion labels, respectively. However, younger childrenwere more likely than older children to recall self-conscioustype emotions with basic labels. The mean proportion of 6-,8- and 10-year-old children recalling a self-conscious or self-conscious evaluative emotion as a basic emotion (e.g., happysubstituted for pride, mad substituted for embarrassed) was.56, .44, and .22, for 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds respectively.

A main effect of retention interval was found,F(1,50) = 10.49, p < .002, partial η2 = .17, as childrenrecalled more story information on the first day than onthe second, and a retention interval × type of information(non-emotion behavior, emotion behavior, emotion label)× gender interaction, F(2,50) = 4.58, p < .02, partialη2 = .16, was found. Although recall of non-emotion

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Table 2 Mean proportion of basic (happy, mad), self-conscious (em-barrassment, envy) and self-conscious evaluative (guilt, pride) emotionsrecalled by boys and girls in experiment 1

Type of emotion behaviorHappy Mad EmbarrassmentBoys Girls Boys Girls Boys Girls

6-year-olds

.53 (.44) .50 (.50) .43 (.32) .67 (.29) .67 (.36) .50 (.50)

8-year-olds

.59 (.44) .64 (.38) .77 (.34) .87 (.24) .76 (.23) .71 (.49)

10-year-olds

1.00(.00)

.93 (.18) .90 (.22) .87 (.23) .80 (.27) .63 (.40)

Envy Guilt PrideBoys Girls Boys Girls Boys Girls

6-year-olds

.17 (.31) .33(.29) .73 (.37) .83 (.29) .17 (.36) .17 (.29)

8-year-olds

.43 (.35) .50 (.48) .63 (.39) .71 (.27) .32 (.25) .50 (.29)

10-year-olds

.70 (.45) .80 (.32) .90 (.22) .90 (.20) .50 (.50) .73 (.42)

Note. Only recall from the first day of testing is presented. The samepattern of recall was found for day two, although children recalled lessinformation. Standard deviations are in parentheses.

behaviors did not differ between boys and girls acrossretention intervals, boys showed greater loss of recall ofemotion behaviors, or at least were less likely to reportthem, on the second day than girls, t(16) ≥ 8.93, p ≤ .001.The mean proportion of emotion behaviors recalled on thefirst day, but not on the second, was .10 for boys and .03 forgirls. A similar pattern was found for emotion labels.

Boys and girls also differed in terms of their recall ofdifferent types of emotions. Children’s mean recall of eachindividual emotion is shown in Table 2. An item x genderx age interaction was found, F(10,250) = 2.60, p < .01,partial η2 = .10. While boys and girls across age groupsrecalled non-emotion behaviors the same, t(16) ≤ − .930,p ≥ .34, they differed in their recall of specific emotions.Six- and 8-year-old girls were significantly more likelyto recall guilt than their same-age male peers. Girls alsoshowed significantly greater recall of pride and envy thanboys, at least for some of the age groups, t(16) ≥ 12.00, p ≤.001, see Table 2. In contrast, boys recalled embarrassmentbetter than girls, t(16) ≥ 10.06, p ≤ .001. Interestingly,the character that was embarrassed in each story was male.However, across ages, boys and girls recalled the emotionbehavior depicting “happy” the same, t(16) ≤ .879, p ≥ .39.

These findings suggest that boys and girls might recall thestory with a female protagonist (Nicole story) and a male pro-tagonist (Jimmy story) differently. Indeed, a story (Nicole,Jimmy) × type of information × gender interaction wasfound, F(2,100) = 4.36, p < .02, partial η2 = .08. For boththe emotion behaviors and emotion labels, girls remembered

the story with the male protagonist (Jimmy) and the femaleprotagonist (Nicole) equally well (M = .33, .33, Jimmy andNicole stories, respectively). However, boys consistently re-called more emotion behaviors and labels from the story witha male protagonist than from the story with a female protag-onist, (M = .42, .27, Jimmy and Nicole stories, respectively;t(16) ≥ 10.06, p ≤ 001).

Race, however, did not enter into any significant effects.Although some of the children were bilingual this did notaffect their recall of the stories (which were read in English)as no significant differences were found in the recall of storiesamong racial groups.

Other factors affecting recall

Other factors could affect recall, including length of sen-tence and position of sentence in story. Although emo-tion sentences were longer than non-emotion sentences (perword), and emotion behaviors consisted of slightly longersentence clauses, it was not the case that longer emotionsentences and clauses were better recalled than shorteremotion sentences and clauses. There was also no evi-dence that sentence position affected recall, t(54) ≤ .822,p ≥ .30. These factors were also ruled out for the secondexperiment.

Discussion

Overall, a recall advantage was found for emotion behav-iors, although this was not the case for all emotions. Forexample, 6-year-olds had particular trouble recalling the self-conscious types of emotions envy and pride. Additionally,negative emotions were better recalled than positive emo-tions, regardless of type of emotion. Although some havesuggested an evolutionary advantage for recalling negativeemotions over positive emotions (see, e.g., Tracy & Robins,2004), the roots of this advantage may lie in the language en-vironment children are routinely exposed to as parents havebeen found to talk in more detail about negative than positiveemotions (e.g., Lagattuta & Wellman, 2002).

Gender differences were also found in the presentresearch, with girls recalling equal amounts of informationfrom the stories with a boy and girl protagonist, whereasboys recalled more information from the story with a maleprotagonist. Overall, girls recalled individual emotionsfrom the stories better than boys, with the exception ofthe emotion embarrassment. However, in both stories thecharacter who experienced embarrassment was a boy. Therewas some evidence that girls recalled guilt more so thanboys, a finding consistent with past research that has foundheightened levels guilt and shame in even preschool-agegirls (Zahn-Waxler et al., 1991).

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The present results also showed that children were betterat recalling emotion behaviors than emotion labels. Althoughlabeling may serve as a retrieval cue, labels themselves arenot necessarily recalled. These results are consistent withseminal research by Widen and Russell (2004), who foundthat young children were more accurate in determining anemotion’s cause when provided with the behavioral conse-quences than when provided with just the emotion label or thefacial expression. Such findings suggested the need to exam-ine whether labeling the emotions affects recall. Also of in-terest was whether gender differences were dependent uponthe emotion behaviors being labeled as such, and whethernegative emotions would continue to be better recalled thanpositive emotions when the specific negative (and positive)labels were removed. These issues were addressed in thesecond experiment.

Experiment 2: Recall of non-emotional andunlabeled emotional information from stories

Method

Participants

Fifty-two children participated: 16 six-year-olds (mean age6.3, age range 5.7–6.9), 18 eight-year-olds (mean age 8.1,age range 7.8–8.3) and 18 ten-year-olds (mean age 10.2, agerange 9.10–10.5). Eleven children were replaced, either be-cause they did not remember both stories (6-year-olds only)or because they were absent on the second day of testing.Children were drawn from similar schools as children inthe first experiment. Sixty-eight percent of the children wereEuropean American, 20% were Latin American, 10% wereAfrican American, and 2% were Asian American. In eachage group, approximately half the children were male andhalf were female.

Materials and procedure

The same stories and procedure used in the first experimentwere used in the second experiment with the exception thatthe specific emotion labels were removed from the stories.

Results

Mean proportions of behaviors correctly recalled from thestories are shown in Table 3. A mixed-model analysis ofvariance was conducted on the data, with between-subjectsvariables age (6, 8, 10) and gender, and within-subjects vari-ables story (Jimmy, Nicole), retention interval (immediate,24-h), behavior (non-emotion behavior, emotion behavior),

Table 3 Mean proportion of non-emotional behaviors and unlabeledemotional behaviors correctly recalled in experiment 2

Type of informationNon-emotional behavior Emotional behavior

Protagonist Nicole Jimmy Nicole Jimmy

6-year-oldsBoys .25 (.14) .50 (.28) .48 (.46) .63 (.43)Girls .30 (.18) .37 (.18) .33 (.31) .56 (.35)

8-year-oldsBoys .33 (.17) .50 (.38) .60 (.30) .64 (.48)Girls .32 (.17) .58 (.25) .70 (.23) .70 (.45)

10-year-oldsBoys .48 (.24) .73 (.34) .75 (.43) .88 (.26)Girls .50 (.30) .68 (.21) .73 (.42) .93 (.18)

Note. Recall is for the first day of testing. The same pattern of recallwas found for day two, although children recalled less information.Standard deviations are in parentheses.

and type of item item (the six non-emotion behaviors, the sixemotion behaviors).

As shown in Table 3, emotion behaviors were bet-ter recalled than non-emotion behaviors for all children,F(1,45) = 70.47, p < .0001, partial η2 = .61. However, sev-eral interactions qualified these findings: a story x agex type of item interaction, F(10,225) = 1.92, p < .04,partial η2 = .08, a story × item × gender interaction,F(5,225) = 3.00, p < .01, partial η2 = .06, and a behavior xtype of item interaction, F(5,225) = 5.10, p < .0001, partialη2 = .10. Simple main effects analysis and paired-samplest-tests, with familywise error rate controlled for by usingHolm’s sequential Bonferroni approach, were conducted onthe significant results.

Follow-up analyses revealed that while non-emotion be-haviors were recalled about the same, differences were foundin the recall of emotion behaviors, and these differences var-ied between the two stories, the age groups and the genders.Specifically, 10-year-old children were more likely than 6-and 8-year-old children to recall certain self-conscious typesof emotions. As shown in Table 4, envy (a self-consciousemotion) and pride (a self-conscious evaluative emotion)were recalled significantly less well than the other emotions,particularly by the younger, 6- and 8-year-old children. Re-call for these emotions was much better for the 10-year-oldchildren, t(31) ≥ − 4.530, p ≤ .0001.

Significant differences were also found between boys’ andgirls’ recall of individual emotions. Younger boys recalledsignificantly more of the embarrassment action than youngergirls, t(50) = 2.13, p < .05, a finding consistent with thefirst experiment, see Table 4. In contrast to the results ofthe first experiment, overall, girls did not show the samerecall advantage for emotion when the emotion labels wereremoved, t(50) ≤ 1.46, p ≥ .10. Furthermore, both boys and

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Table 4 Mean proportion of basic (happy, mad), self-conscious (em-barrassment, envy) and self-conscious evaluative (guilt, pride) emotionsrecalled by boys and girls in experiment 2

Type of emotion behaviorHappy Mad EmbarrassmentBoys Girls Boys Girls Boys Girls

6-year-olds

.60 (.51) .55(.50) .75 (.45) .90 (.23) .85 (.37) .40 (.50)

8-year-olds

.72 (.46) .78 (.44) .93 (.19) .96 (.15) .86 (.38) .78 (.44)

10-year-olds

.88 (.35) .80 (.40) .88 (.23) .95 (.16) .88 (.35) .95 (.16)

Envy Guilt PrideBoys Girls Boys Girls Boys Girls

6-year-olds

.26 (.23) .30 (.48) .65 (.48) .70 (.28) .20 (.40) .30 (.50)

8-year-olds

.36 (.52) .41 (.52) .64 (.52) .87 (.24) .22 (.28) .41 (.50)

10-year-olds

.75 (.27) .70 (.26) .76 (.44) .80 (.42) .76 (.44) .80 (.40)

Note. Only recall from the first day of testing is presented. The samepattern of recall was found for day two, although children recalled lessinformation. Standard deviations are in parentheses.

girls recalled more from the Jimmy story than the Nicolestory, t(50) = − 3.83, p < .0001.

Discussion

Consistent with the results of the first experiment, a memoryadvantage for emotion was found. Thus, the present resultsare consistent with recent research showing that youngchildren can use the behavioral consequences, and not justthe behavioral labels, to identify emotion (Widen & Russell,2004). However, the memory results were dependent uponthe type of emotion expressed in the stories and the age ofthe children who were asked to recall it. Specifically, envyand pride were recalled less well by the 6- and 8-year-oldchildren. Significant improvements were found in the recallof these self-conscious types of emotions by the older,10-year-old, children. Additionally, negative emotions (i.e.,mad, embarrassment, guilt) were better recalled than positive(e.g., happy, proud) emotions, a finding consistent with thefirst experiment. In contrast, less gender differences werefound in children’s recall of the stories in this experiment.This may have been due to the removal of the emotion label,as children were only expected to give back the emotionbehavior and not label it in their recall.

Experiment 3: Children’s explanations of emotions

The purpose of the third experiment was to assess chil-dren’s understanding of the basic, self-conscious and self-

conscious evaluative emotions presented in the stories. Alsoassessed were previous notions (Griffin, 1995; Harter, 1999)that children’s understanding of emotion proceeds from astrictly behavioral perspective, to a psychological perspec-tive that includes the intentions of the actor and the ob-server, to an incorporation of the societal norms or standardsthat may exist about individual emotions. For example, onewould expect that younger children might find it more diffi-cult to explain self-conscious evaluative emotions, and mayeven resort to describing these emotions with more simpleexplanations.

Method

Participants

Fifty-four children participated: 18 six-year-olds (mean age6.4, age range 6.0–6.8), 18 eight-year-olds (mean age 8.6,age range 8.1–8.10) and 18 ten-year-olds (mean age 10.5,age range 10.0–10.10). Children were drawn from similarneighborhoods as children in the first two experiments. Sixtypercent were European American, 20% were Latin Ameri-can, 15% were African American, and the remaining 5%were Asian American. In each age group, half the childrenwere male and half were female.

Materials and procedure

The same two stories and pictures used in the first experimentwere used in this experiment. Individually, children wereread these stories and were asked questions about the sixemotion behaviors (basic, self-conscious and self-consciousevaluative) appearing in each story. For example, childrenwere asked, “Why do you think Jimmy was mad when thebully knocked his books out of his hands?” The children werealso asked how they would feel in similar circumstances, e.g.,“How would you feel if a bully knocked your books out ofyour hands on the way to school?”

Coding

Children’s explanations for emotions were classified intoone of three categories: “behavioral”, “psychological” and“psychological plus taking into account the role of others”.Behavioral explanations focused exclusively on the behav-ior (e.g., “He got a good grade and that made him happy.”);explanations classified as “psychological’ focused on theintentions of the actor and or the observer, whereas thoselabeled “psychological plus taking into account the roleof others” made mention of norms that underlie the emo-tions (e.g., “Parents are always happy when kids get goodgrades”.) Two coders coded the data, with agreement at 92%.Disagreements were resolved through discussion. When

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children used more than one type of explanation their re-sponses were scored on only the most advanced or sophisti-cated explanation given.

Results

For each emotion, two-way contingency table analyses wereconducted with variables age and type of explanation. Gen-der and race, however, did not produce significant differencesin children’s explanations of emotions. Thus, the results arecollapsed across these variables.

Basic emotions (happy and mad)

As shown in Table 5, children’s explanations for the basicemotions (happy and mad) emotions appearing in the storiesrevealed that 6-year-olds were more likely than older chil-dren to use simple behavioral explanations for happy andmad emotions, (e.g., “He got a good grade.”; “Nicole got apresent.”; “He dropped his books and maybe they got dirty.”).In contrast, significantly more 8- and 10-year-olds gave psy-chological explanations for happy and mad emotions, allud-ing sometimes to how others would feel (e.g., “He was happybecause he got a good grade and parents are always happywhen you get a good grade.”), χ2(2) ≥ 6.38, p ≤ .04.

Self-conscious emotions (Embarrassment and envy)

Children’s use of each type of explanation for self-consciousemotions is shown in Table 5. For embarrassment, 6- and 8-year-old children used behavioral explanations significantlymore so than10-year-old children. Ten-year-old childrenwere more likely to refer to one’s psychological response(e.g., “Everyone laughed at him and he felt two inches tall.”)or others’ role in causing the embarrassment, (e.g., referringto the fact that he fell in front of his sister and her friend),χ2(2) ≥ 7.73, p ≤ .02. Six- and 8-year-old children alsomore readily used behavioral explanations to explain envy,whereas 10-year-olds made more reference to the role ofothers in the story character’s experience of envy, (e.g., “Itreminds him of what he is missing when his friends havethings he does not have and really wants.”), χ2(2) ≤ 6.67,p ≤ .05.

Self-conscious evaluative emotions (Guilt and pride)

Explanations for the self-conscious evaluative emotions,guilt and pride, ranged from simple behavioral explanationsto more complex psychological explanations that took intoaccount the role of another, including the role of society(see Table 5). Six- and 8-year-old children were more likelyto give behavioral explanations (e.g., “The baseball was new

Table 5 Mean proportion of times children used each type of expla-nation for basic, self-conscious and self-conscious evaluative emotionsin experiment 3

Type of explanationPsychological-

Behavioral Psychological role of other

Basic emotions: happyand mad6-year-olds .68 .23 .098-year-olds .40 .49 .1110-year-olds .26 .50 .24

Self-consciousemotions:embarrassment andenvy6-year-olds .64 .18 .188-year-olds .60 .17 .2310-year-olds .28 .17 .55

Self-consciousevaluative emotions:guilt and pride6-year-olds .80 .11 .098-year-olds .57 .21 .2210-year-olds .30 .30 .40

and now it was dirty and you couldn’t play with it anymore.”;“She would be proud of Nicole for cleaning up her room aftershe played and made a mess.”), whereas 10-year-old childrenwere significantly more likely to offer psychological expla-nations especially for “guilt”, (e.g., “You shouldn’t do thatto your friend’s stuff. It makes everyone feel bad and makesthe world a worse place.”), χ2 (2) ≥ 5.89, p ≤ .05.

Although less sophisticated explanations were used by allof the children to explain “proud”, at least some of the 10-year-old children expanded upon their explanations by notingwhat one should do by referring to norms or standards, (e.g.,“Nicole’s mom was proud of Nicole for cleaning her roombecause she didn’t have to be told to do the right thing. Itwas a good thing to do.”), χ2(2) ≥ 6.90, p ≤ .05.

In summary, 6-year-old children were more likely to usebehavioral explanations than psychological explanationsfor all emotions, although they were most likely to usebehavioral explanations with self-conscious evaluativeemotions. Eight-year-olds were more likely to use behav-ioral explanations with self-conscious and self-consciousevaluative emotions, than basic emotions. In contrast,only about 30% of 10-year-old children’s explanationswere behaviorally based, and their use of behavioralexplanations was not affected by type of emotion. Theseresults suggest that children under 10 years of age usemore simple, behavioral explanations with emotions thatare difficult to understand and explain, χ2(2) ≥ 6.68,p ≤ .05.

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Personal attributions

For each emotion action appearing in the stories, childrenwere asked how they would feel. For the “happy” emotion,children said they would feel the same as the protagonist,with 100% agreement. However, 6-year-old children wereless likely to feel the same as the protagonist (in 35% of thecases a child stated he or she would feel differently) than8-year-old children (22% felt differently) and 10-year-oldchildren (15%). Of those cases when children did not feelthe same way as the protagonist, children said they wouldfeel a more basic emotion. For embarrassment, 64% saidthat they would feel “mad” and 36% said they would feel“sad”, for envy, 63% said they would feel “happy”, whilefor guilty, 75% of those responding differently said theywould feel “sad”. Note that these type of responses reflectedyounger children’s substitution of more basic emotions forself-conscious and self-conscious evaluative emotions.

Discussion

In order to assess children’s understanding of basic, self-conscious and self-conscious evaluative emotions, and toassess the relevancy of such a distinction between emotionsfrom a developmental perspective, children were asked toexplain why the characters in the stories experienced eachemotion and to report how they would feel in similar cir-cumstances. Previous research has suggested that childrenyounger than 7 or 8 do not take into account the inten-tions of another in their understanding of emotion, relyinginstead on a behavior description to explain the emotion(e.g., Griffin, 1995; Harter, 1999). The present results sup-port this argument, to the extent that 6-year-old children weremore likely to use behavioral than psychological explana-tions when asked to explain emotions. In fact, the 6-year-oldchildren provided behavioral explanations for all three typesof emotions, and were most likely to use behavioral expla-nations for self-conscious evaluative emotions.

Although previous research has suggested that the use ofbehavioral explanations lessens after 6 or 7 years of age,we found that even 8-year-olds used behavioral explanationswith self-conscious and self-conscious evaluative emotions.Only 10-year-olds used psychological explanations with ba-sic and non-basic emotions. These results suggest that chil-dren’s understanding of emotion should be assessed across arange of basic and self-conscious emotions.

General discussion

The purpose of the present research was to examine 6-, 8-and 10-year-old children’s memory and understanding of ba-sic, self-conscious and self-conscious evaluative emotions.

According to past work (Ekman, 1992; Izard, 1992; Lewis,2000b), there are only a limited number of basic emotionsand these emotions are characterized by their early appear-ance in life and by having prototypical and universal facialexpressions. In contrast, self-conscious and self-consciousevaluative emotions show weaker evidence of universality,with antecedents and consequences often differing acrosscultures (Tracy & Robins, 2004). However, the major differ-ence between basic and self conscious emotions may be thatthe latter require more complex processing of information,particularly social information, than basic emotions (Lewis,2000b; Tangney & Fischer, 1995).

Although researchers have linked self-conscious and self-conscious evaluative emotions to psychological function-ing in children and adults (e.g., Denham, 1998; Tracy &Robins, 2004), few studies have assessed the effects theseemotions play on cognitive processing and memory. Fur-thermore, while a distinction between basic, self-consciousand self-conscious evaluative emotions has been made eitherdirectly (e.g., Lewis, 2000b) or indirectly (e.g., Izard et al.,1999; Tracy & Robins, 2004), past studies have not assessedwhether this distinction is relevant in terms of children’sunderstanding of emotion and their subsequent memory ofemotion.

The results of the present research suggest that this dis-tinction may be relevant, at least between basic and self-conscious emotions. For example, younger children recalledless well, and struggled to explain, the self-conscious eval-uative emotion, pride, and were less likely to use psy-chological explanations when asked to explain its occur-rence in the stories. Six-year-olds also had trouble recall-ing envy. Indeed, younger children more readily substitutedbasic emotion labels when recalling and explaining self-conscious and self-conscious evaluative emotions than olderchildren.

These results suggest that it is premature to claim thatemotion in and of itself aids children’s memory. Althougha memory advantage for emotion was found, these resultswere dependent upon the type of emotion and the age ofthe child. In fact, valence of emotion appeared to play aneven more significant role in memory as negative emo-tions (e.g., mad, embarrassment, guilt) were better recalledthan positive emotions (happy and pride), regardless ofthe type of emotion. Such results are consistent with nar-rative studies that have shown that child-parent discourseabout negative emotions included a larger emotion vocabu-lary, more open-ended questions, and more talk about otherpeople than positive emotions (e.g., Lagattuta & Wellman,2002).

Gender differences in the recall of emotional informa-tion were found. In the first experiment, girls recalled equalamounts of information from the stories with a boy and girlprotagonist, while boys recalled more information from the

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story with a male protagonist. Furthermore, girls had a ten-dency to recall individual emotions from the stories betterthan boys, with the exception of the emotion embarrassment.However, in both stories the character who experienced em-barrassment was a boy. Labeling emotion may have played apart in these gender differences, as gender differences weremore prevalent in the first study, when emotions were specif-ically labeled, than in the second study when they were not.These results are consistent with the findings of Widen andRussell (2004), who found that young children’s identifica-tion of emotion was better when a label was provided thanwhen just a facial expression was provided.

Gender differences in the recall of emotion may have theirroots in parent-child discourse, as Fivush and her colleagueshave found that mothers are more likely to reminisce aboutemotion in more elaborative and evaluative ways with theirdaughters than with their sons (Fivush et al., 2003). Othershave found heightened levels of guilt and shame in girls thanin boys (e.g., Zahn-Waxler et al., 1991), a finding consistentwith the results of the first study as 6- and 8-year-old girlswere more likely to recall guilt than their same-age malepeers. Although it is not clear from the present researchwhether boys reported fewer emotions because they remem-bered fewer of them, or because they felt less comfortablereporting emotions, these findings do not appear to be dueto differences in their understanding of emotions. That is,both boys and girls gave similar types of explanations for

emotions in the third experiment, with the only significantdifferences being developmental ones.

Specifically, 6- and 8-year-old children gave more behav-ioral types of explanations than 10-year-old children. In fact,8-year-old children showed an interesting result as they usedmore psychological explanations for basic emotions than forself-conscious types of emotions. It was not until 10 yearsof age that children used more sophisticated, psychologi-cal explanations for both basic and self-conscious types ofemotions. Although past theories of emotional developmenthave suggested that only children younger than 7 or 8 use be-havioral explanations of emotions, the results of the presentresearch suggest that even 8-year-old children use these be-havioral explanations with self-conscious types of emotions.

Although the present results showed an overall recall ad-vantage for emotional behaviors, both when the emotionwas specifically labeled (experiment 1) and when it was not(experiment 2), emotion, in and of itself, does not alwaysaid children’s recall. This is particularly true for childrenyounger than 9 or 10, who may not recall all types of self-conscious emotions. Thus, type of emotion, valence of emo-tion, even the protagonist who is experiencing the emotion,may alter the findings. Likewise, children’s explanations ofemotions may vary as a function of the type of emotion,suggesting that future developmental research on emotionshould include basic, self-conscious and self-conscious eval-uative emotions in the tasks.

Appendix

Table A1 Stories used in the experiments

Jimmy StoryJimmy is 8-years-old and walks to school everyday. Jimmy likes to walk to school (NE). Sometimes Jimmy likes to ride his bike to school too (NE).One morning when Jimmy to school a bully knocked his books out of his hands. That made Jimmy mad (EMO). After Jimmy picked up his books hesaw his friend Bill (NE). Bill showed Jimmy his new baseball. Jimmy wished he had a baseball like his friend’s and was jealous of him (EMO). Atschool Jimmy’s class had to take a spelling and a math test (NE). Jimmy did well on his spelling test which made him happy (EMO). During lunch,Jimmy dropped his tray of food and food went everywhere. Everyone laughed at Jimmy and made fun of him, which made Jimmy turn red and becomeembarrassed (EMO). One the way home school Jimmy threw his friend’s baseball in some muddy water. Jimmy then felt guilty about doing that(EMO). At home Jimmy’s mom was very proud of Jimmy for getting a good grade on his spelling test (EMO). After Jimmy did his homework hewatched a little tv (NE). Then it was time for Jimmy to go to bed. So he said goodnight to his parents and he fell asleep (NE).

NicoleNicole is 9-year-old and loves to play with her Barbie dolls. Nicole likes to play with her dolls after school (NE). For her last birthday Nicole’s momgave her some really nice Barbie doll clothes which made Nicole very happy (EMO). One day Cathy came over to play with Nicole (NE). When herfriend Cathy saw the new Barbie doll clothes she was jealous, that is, she wished that she had some too (EMO). Nicole and Cathy like to put on pretendfashion shows with their Barbies (NE). One day while playing with their dolls they also ate cookies and drank milk (NE). Nicole’s mom had baked thecookies the day before (NE). When Nicole and Cathy were playing with their dolls Nicole’s younger brother Bobby came running into the bedroomand grabbed the dolls from the girls. This made Nicole mad because she had told her brother once before to leave them alone (EMO). When her brotherBobby was running out of the room he slipped and fell and the Barbies went flying. Nicole and Cathy started laughing at Bobby and making fun ofhim. Bobby became embarrassed and he turned very red (EMO). While they were playing with their dolls, Cathy tore Nicole’s new doll clothes. ThenCathy felt badly about that and she felt so guilty that she said she was sorry (EMO). When they were finished playing Nicole picked up her bedroomwhich pleased her mom and made her mom proud (EMO). Then Cathy said goodbye to Nicole and went home (NE).

Note. Non-emotion (NE) and emotion (EMO) actions. These actions could consist of one or more sentences, as shown. In the second experimentthe emotion labels were removed and occasionally the sentences were altered so that the sentence was grammatically correct. Every sentence inthe story was illustrated with an artist-drawn illustration.

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Acknowledgments I wish to thank all the graduate and undergrad-uate students who assisted in data collecting, including Mariah GracaUgarte, Christopher Stanley, and Dina Tell. I also wish to thank the prin-cipals, teachers, parents and children at the Loyola University ChicagoPreschool, the University of Chicago Lab School, St. BartholomewSchool, St. Andrew School, St. Phillip Lutheran School and St. PascalSchool.

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