ABSTRACT

Self-recognition emerges during the second year of life and represents the emergence of a reflective self, a metacognition which underlies self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment and shame, perspective taking, and emotional knowledge of others. In a longitudinal study of 171 children, two major questions were explored from an extant database: 1) Do early factors, including IQ, general environmental risk, mother-child attachment interaction, drug exposure, gender, and neonatal risk, relate to self-recognition?; 2) Does self-recognition, along with these earlier factors, predict the child’s subsequent emotional knowledge? Consistent with previous data, 39% of children exhibited self-recognition by 18-months and few early factors explored were related to this ability. Moreover, path analysis revealed few effects of the earlier factors predicting self-recognition on children’s emotional knowledge. Self-recognition did predict emotional knowledge at 4.5 years, such that children who showed early self-recognition showed greater emotional knowledge. Children from high risk environments also showed lower emotional knowledge. These findings indicate that self-recognition and environmental risk are related to children’s later knowledge of emotions.

摘要

自我认知出现在生命的第二年，代表着反思性自我的出现，这是一种元认知，它是自我意识情绪的基础，例如尴尬和羞愧、换位思考和对他人的情感知识。在对 171 名儿童进行的纵向研究中，从现有数据库中探索了两个主要问题：1) 早期因素，包括智商、一般环境风险、母子依恋互动、药物暴露、性别和新生儿风险，是否与自我影响有关？认出？; 2) 自我认知以及这些早期因素是否可以预测孩子随后的情感知识？与之前的数据一致，39% 的儿童在 18 个月大时表现出自我认知，并且探索的早期因素很少与这种能力相关。而且，路径分析揭示了早期预测自我认知的因素对儿童情感知识的影响很小。自我认知确实预测了 4.5 岁时的情感知识，因此表现出早期自我认知的儿童表现出更多的情感知识。来自高风险环境的儿童也表现出较低的情感知识。这些发现表明，自我认知和环境风险与儿童后来的情绪知识有关。