Children’s Understanding of Emotions or Pascal’s “Error”: Review and Prospects

This chapter will address four main questions by conducting a review of the last 40 years of research on children’s understanding of emotions: (1) How can we define and measure Emotion Understanding in children (including a discussion of the relation between theory of mind and Emotion Understanding)? (2) How does Emotion Understanding develop in typically developing children, and what individual differences do we observe (including a discussion of the relation between Emotion Understanding and emotional experience)? (3) How can we explain the development and individual differences in children’s Emotion Understanding? (4) What is the impact of Emotion Understanding, and how can we help children to improve their Emotion Understanding? We will conclude by speculating about the origins of Emotion Understanding in Piagetian first-hand observation and in the testimony provided by other people. More broadly, we will try to show that Blaise Pascal’s dictum – “The heart has its reasons, that reason does not know” (Pascal, Preuve de la religion par le peuple juif, les propheties et quelques discours, 1662, p. 251) – is wrong, at least for children, if we accept, as many today do, that “reason” stands for understanding and the “heart” stands for emotion.