Research with adults has increasingly moved beyond the focus on a small set of allegedly basic emotions, each associated with a signature facial expression. That expansion has been accompanied by a greater emphasis on the potential variability of emotion concepts across different cultural settings. In this conceptual review of children’s understanding of emotion, we argue that it is also important in developmental research to look beyond the small set of emotions associated with distinctive facial expressions. At the same time, we caution against any premature rejection of a universalist approach to children’s understanding of emotion. We review three different lines of evidence in support of this stance: (1) children’s ability to appropriately cite situational elicitors for emotions beyond the basic set; (2) their developing understanding of the relations between emotions and other mental processes; and (3) their realization that a person’s facially expressed emotion may not indicate their felt emotion. In each of these three domains, we target studies that have included children from a variety of cultures to assess how far they respond similarly or differently. We conclude that there is robust evidence for similar conceptual progress in children’s understanding of emotion across a range of cultural settings.

对成年人的研究越来越多地超越了对一小部分所谓的基本情绪的关注，每一种情绪都与一个标志性的面部表情相关联。这种扩展伴随着对不同文化背景下情感概念的潜在可变性的更大强调。在这篇关于儿童对情绪理解的概念性回顾中，我们认为在发展研究中，超越与独特面部表情相关的一小部分情绪也很重要。同时，我们告诫不要过早拒绝儿童理解情绪的普遍主义方法。我们回顾了支持这一立场的三种不同的证据：（1）儿童适当地引用情境诱发因素以获取超出基本集合的情绪的能力；(2) 他们对情绪和其他心理过程之间关系的理解不断加深；(3) 他们意识到一个人的面部表情可能并不代表他们感受到的情绪。在这三个领域中的每一个领域，我们的目标研究都包括来自不同文化背景的儿童，以评估他们的反应相似或不同的程度。我们的结论是，有强有力的证据表明，儿童在一系列文化环境中对情绪的理解有类似的概念进步。